Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Twelve: Covering Up the Cover-Up

Jim Freedman remembers the first time he brought up the subject of UFOs with his EG&G supervisor at Area 51. It was sometime in the middle of the 1960s and “UFOs were a pretty big thing,” Freedman explains. Flying saucer sightings had made their way into the news with a fervor not seen since the late 1940s. “I heard through the rumor mill that one of the UFOs had gone to Wright-Pat and was then brought to a remote area of the test site,” Freedman says. “I heard it was in Area 22. I was driving with my supervisor through the test site one day and I told him what I had heard and I asked him what he thought about that. Well, he just kept looking at the road. And then he turned to me and he said, ‘Jim, I don’t want to hear you mention anything like that, ever again, if you want to keep your job.’” Freedman made sure never to bring the subject of UFOs up again when he was at work.

In the mid-1960s, sightings of unidentified flying objects around Area 51 reached unprecedented heights as the A-12 Oxcart flying from Groom Lake was repeatedly mistaken for a UFO. Not since the U-2 had been flying from there were so many UFO reports being dumped on CIA analysts’ desks. The first instance happened only four days after Oxcart’s first official flight, on April 30, 1962. It was a little before 10:00 a.m., and a NASA X-15 rocket plane was making a test flight in the air corridor that ran from Dryden Flight Research Center, in California, to Ely, Nevada, during the same period of time when an A12 was making a test flight in the vicinity at a different altitude. From inside the X-15 rocket plane, test pilot Joe Walker snapped photographs, a task that was part of his mission flight. The X-15 was not a classified program and NASA often released publicity photographs taken during flights, as they did with Walker’s photographs that day. But NASA had not scrutinized the photos closely before their public release, and officials missed the fact that a tiny “UFO” appeared in the corner of one of Walker’s pictures. In reality, it was the Oxcart, but the press identified it as a UFO. A popular theory among ufologists about why aliens would want to visit Earth in the first place has to do with Earthlings’ sudden advance of technologies beginning with the atomic bomb. For this group, it follows that the X-15 —the first manned vehicle to get to the edge of space (the highest X15 flight was 354,200 feet — almost 67 miles above sea level) would be particularly interesting to beings from outer space.

Two weeks after the incident, the CIA’s new director, John McCone, received a secret, priority Teletype on the matter stating that “on 30 April, A-12 was in air at altitude of 30,000 feet from 0948-106 local with concurrent X-15 Test” and that “publicity releases mention unidentified objects on film taken on X-15 flight.” This message, which was not declassified until 2007, illustrates the kind of UFO-related reports that inundated the CIA at this time. In total, 2,850 Oxcart flights would be flown out of Area 51 over a period of six years. Exactly how many of these flights generated UFO reports is not known, but the ones that prompted UFO sightings created the same kinds of problems for the CIA as they had in the previous decade with the U-2, only with elements that were seemingly more inexplicable. With Oxcart, commercial airline pilots flying over Nevada or California would look up and see the shiny, reflective bottom of the Oxcart whizzing by high overhead at triple-sonic speeds and think, UFO. How could they not? When the Oxcart flew at 2,300 miles per hour, it was going approximately five times faster than a commercial airplane — aircraft speeds that were unheard-of in those days. Most Oxcart sightings came right after sunset, when the lower atmosphere was shadowed in dusk. Seventeen miles higher up, the sun was still shining brightly on the Oxcart. The spy plane’s broad titanium wings coupled with its triangle-shaped rear fuselage — reflecting the sun’s rays higher in the sky than aircraft were known to fly — could understandably cause alarm.

The way the CIA dealt with this new crop of sightings was similar to how it handled the U-2s’. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, Area 51’s base commander during this time, explains “commercial pilots would report sightings to the FAA. The flights would be met in California, or wherever they landed, by FBI agents who would make passengers sign inadvertent disclosure forms.” End of story, or so the CIA hoped. Instead, interest in UFOs only continued to grow. The public again put pressure on Congress to find out if the federal government was involved in covering up UFOs. When individual congressmen asked the CIA if it was involved in UFOs, the Agency would always say no.

On May 10, 1966, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, hosted a CBS news special report called UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? To an audience of millions of Americans, Cronkite announced that the CIA was part of a government cover-up regarding UFOs. The CIA had been actively analyzing UFO data despite repeatedly denying to Congress that it was doing so, Cronkite said. He was absolutely correct. The Agency had been tracking UFO sightings around the world since the 1950s and actively lying about its interest in them. The CIA could not reveal the classified details of the U-2 program — the existence of which had been outed by the Gary Powers shoot-down but the greater extent of which would remain classified until 1998—nor could it reveal anything related to the Oxcart program and those sightings. That remained top secret until 2007. In Cronkite’s exposй, the CIA looked like liars.

It got worse for the Agency. The Cronkite program also reopened a twelve-year-old can of UFO worms known as the Robertson Panel report of 1953. Dr. Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports program and disclosed that the UFO inquiry bearing his name had in fact been sponsored by the CIA beginning in 1952, despite repeated denials by officials. The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on UFOs in July of 1966, which resulted in the Air Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA. “The Air Force… approached the Agency for declassification,” testified secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown. Brown stated that while there was no evidence that “strangers from outer space” had been visiting Earth, it was time for the CIA to come clean on its secret studies regarding UFOs.

According to CIA historian Gerald Haines, “The Agency again refused to budge. Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence], wrote the Air Force that ‘we are most anxious that further publicity not be given to the information that the panel was sponsored by the CIA.’” Weber’s words, said Haines, were “shortsighted and ill considered” because the Air Force in turn gave that information to a journalist named John Lear, the science editor of the Saturday Review. Lear’s September 1966 article “The Disputed CIA Document on UFO’s” put yet another spotlight on the CIA’s ongoing cover-up of UFOs. Lear, unsympathetic to the idea of extraterrestrials, demanded the release of the report. The CIA held firm that its information was classified, and the full, unsanitized facts regarding the Agency’s role in unidentified flying objects remains classified as of 2011.

The public was outraged by the layers of obfuscation. The year 1966 was the height of the Vietnam War, and the federal government’s ability to tell the truth was under fire. Pressure on Congress to make more information known did not let up. And so once again, as it had been in the late 1940s, the Air Force was officially “put in charge” of investigating individual UFO claims. The point of having the Air Force in charge, said Congress, was to oversee the untrustworthy CIA. One of the great ironies at work in this was that only a handful of Air Force generals were cleared for knowledge about Oxcart flights blazing in and out of Area 51, which meant that to most Air Force investigators, Oxcart sightings were in fact unidentified flying objects. Further feeding public discord, several key Air Force officials who had previously been involved in investigating UFOs now believed the Air Force was also engaged in covering up UFOs. Several of these men left government service to write books about UFOs and help the public persuade Congress to do more.

For more than two hundred years, since the invention of the hot-air balloon, people all over the world have been terrified of unidentified flying objects because their very existence makes man feel vulnerable from an attack from above. The War of the Worlds radio-broadcast phenomenon was far from the first such incident. The first pictorially recorded panic over a UFO event occurred in August of 1783, shortly after two French brothers named Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier secured patronage from the king of France to design and fly a hot-air balloon — the eighteenth-century version of a modern-day defense contract. During one of the Montgolfiers’ early flight tests, a balloon got caught in a thunderstorm and crashed in a small French village called Gonesse. The peasants that inhabited the town thought the balloon was a monster attacking them from the sky. A pen-and-ink drawing from that time shows men with pitchforks and scythes ripping the crashed balloon to shreds. Townsfolk in the background can be seen running away, flailing their arms above their heads in fear. From this story, it is easy to see that with any new form of flight comes the archetypal fear of an attack from above. In the more than two hundred years since, these fears have taken dramatic twists and turns.

Twenty years into the American jet age, in the mid-1960s, fears of unidentified flying objects continued to shape cultural thinking and spawn industries. By then, millions of Americans correctly believed that various factions inside the U.S. government were actively engaged in a cover-up regarding UFOs. Many citizens believed the government was trying to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial beings; people did not consider the fact that by overfocusing on Martians, they would pay less attention to other UFO realities, namely, that these were sightings of radical aircraft made by men. By the late 1960s, the two government agencies at the forefront of citizens’ wrath — the CIA and the Air Force — had been using cover and deception as tools to keep classified programs out of the public eye. Cover conceals the truth, and deception conveys false information. From cover stories about airplane crashes to deception campaigns about covert UFO study programs, both organizations had created complex webs of lies. How exactly a deception campaign works on ordinary people is best exemplified by this factual, dawn-of-the-jet-age U.S. Army Air Corps tale.

In 1942, when the jet engine was first being developed, the Army Air Corps desired to keep the radical new form of flight a secret until the military was ready to unveil the technology on its own terms. Before the jet engine, airplanes flew by propellers, and before 1942, for most people it was a totally foreign concept for an airplane to fly without the blades of a propeller spinning around. With the jet engine, in order to maintain silence on this technological breakthrough, the Army Air Corps entered into a rather benign strategic deception campaign involving a group of its pilots. Every time a test pilot took a Bell XP59A jet aircraft out on a flight test over the Muroc dry lake bed in California’s Mojave Desert, the crew attached a dummy propeller to the airplane’s nose first. The Bell pilots had a swath of airspace in which to perform flight tests but every now and then a pilot training on a P-38 Lightning would cruise into the adjacent vicinity to try to get a look at the airplane. The airplane was seen trailing smoke, and eventually, rumors started to circulate at local pilot bars. Pilots wanted to know what was being hidden from them.

According to Edwards Air Force Base historian Dr. James Young, the chief XP-59A Bell test pilot, a man by the name of Jack Woolams, got an idea. He ordered a gorilla mask from a Hollywood prop house. On his next flight, Woolams removed the mock-up propeller from the nose of his jet airplane and put on the gorilla mask. When a P-38 Lightning came flying nearby for a look, Woolams maneuvered his airplane close enough so that the P-38 pilot could look inside the cockpit of the jet plane. The Lightning pilot was astonished. Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane — an airplane that had no propeller. The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar, where he sat down and ordered a stiff drink. There, he began telling other pilots what he had definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that what he was saying was an embarrassment, and that he should go home. Meanwhile, the concept of the gorilla mask caught on among other Bell XP-59A test pilots and soon Woolams’s colleagues joined the act. Over the course of the next few months, other P-38 Lightning pilots spotted the gorilla flying the propellerless airplane. Some versions of the historical record have the psychiatrist for the U.S. Army Air Corps getting involved, helping the Lightning pilots to understand how a clear-thinking fighter pilot could become disoriented at altitude and believe he had seen something that clearly was not really there. Everyone knows that a gorilla can’t fly an airplane. Whether or not the psychiatrist really did get involved— and if he did, whether he was aware of the gorilla masks — remains ambiguous to Dr. Craig Luther, a contemporary historian at Edwards Air Force Base. But for the purposes of a strategic deception campaign, the point is clear: no one wants to be mistaken for a fool.

Ockham’s razor is an idea attributed to a fourteenth-century English friar named William of Ockham. It asks when trying to explain a phenomenon, does the alternative story explain more evidence than the principal story, or is it just a more complicated and therefore a less useful explanation of the same evidence? In other words, according to Ockham, when man is presented with a riddle, the answer to the riddle should be simpler, not more complicated, than the riddle itself. Ockham’s razor is often applied to the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. In the case of the flying-gorilla story, the true explanation — that the gorilla was actually a pilot with a gorilla mask on — offered the simplest answer to what appeared to be an inexplicable phenomenon. The same can be said about the truth regarding the Roswell crash. But it would take decades for more to be revealed.

One of the more enigmatic figures involved in the Roswell mystery was Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first man to run the CIA. Hillenkoetter was the director of Central Intelligence from May 1, 1947, until October 7, 1950. After his retirement from the CIA, Hillenkoetter returned to a career in the navy. Curiously, after he retired from the Navy, in the late 1950s, he served on the board of governors of a group of UFO researchers called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Hillenkoetter’s placement on the board was a paradox. He was there, in part, to learn what the UFO researchers knew about unidentified flying crafts. But he also empathized with their work. While Hillenkoetter did not believe UFOs were from outer space, he knew unidentified flying objects were a serious national security concern. In his position as CIA director Hillenkoetter knew that the flying disc at Roswell had been sent by Joseph Stalin. And he knew of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s fear that what had been achieved once could happen again. Which makes it peculiar that, in February of 1960, in a rare reveal by a former cabinet-level official, Hillenkoetter testified to Congress that he was dismayed at how the Air Force was handling UFOs. To the Senate Science and Astronautics Committee he stated that “behind the scenes, highranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He also claimed that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”

Hillenkoetter remained a ranking member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1962, when he mysteriously resigned. Equally puzzling was that the man who later replaced Hillenkoetter and became the head of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1969 was Joseph Bryan III — the CIA’s first chief of political and psychological warfare. Not much is known about Bryan’s true role with the ufologists because his work at the CIA remains classified as of 2011. If his name sounds familiar, it is because Joe Bryan was the man scheduled for a hunting trip with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell’s friend and predecessor at the CIA. But before Bryan arrived that day, on October 29, 1965, Wisner shot himself in the head.

At the CIA, during the mid-1960s, the thinking regarding UFOs began to move in a different direction. Since the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon, in June of 1947, the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs. They were (a) experimental aircraft, (b) the delusions of a paranoid person’s mind, or (c) part of a psychological warfare campaign by the Soviet Union to create panic among the people and sow seeds of governmental mistrust. But by 1966, a faction within the CIA added a fourth line of thought to its concerns: maybe UFOs were real. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring of circumstances in the Soviet Union, which was also in the midst of a UFO sea change.

In the 1940s and until Stalin’s death in 1953, CIA analysts of Soviet publications had found only one known mention of UFOs, in an editorial published in a Moscow newspaper in 1951. Khrushchev appeared to have continued the policy. The analysts at CIA assigned to monitor the Soviet press during his tenure found no stories about UFOs. But curiously, in 1964, after Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him from power and installed Leonid Brezhnev in his place, articles on UFOs began to emerge. In 1966, a series of articles about UFOs were published by Novosti, Moscow’s official news agency. Two leading scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute not only were writing about UFOs but were split on their opinions about them, which was highly unusual for Soviet state-funded scientists. One of the scientists, Villen Lyustiberg, promoted the idea that UFOs were the creation of the American government and that “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures and aggressions.” A second leading scientist, Dr. Felix Zigel, had come to believe that UFOs were in fact real.

Declassified CIA memos written during this time reveal a concern that if the leading scientists and astronomers in the Soviet Union believed UFOs were real, maybe UFOs truly were real after all. In 1968, the CIA learned that a Soviet air force general named Porfiri Stolyarov had been named the chairman of a new “UFO Section of the All-Union Cosmonautics Committee” in Moscow. After learning that Russia had an official UFO committee, the CIA went scrambling for its own science on UFOs. For the first time in its history, America’s spy agency internally allowed for the fact that UFOs might in fact be coming from outer space. “The hypothesis that UFOs originate in other worlds, that they are flying craft from other planets other than Earth, merits the most serious examination,” read one secret memo that was circulated among CIA analysts.

Had the original UFO cover-up — the crash of the Horten brothers’ flying disc at Roswell — created this Hydra-like monster? Had maintaining secrecy around the follow-up program, which had been clandestinely set up in the Nevada desert just outside Area 51, resulted in such endemic paranoia among analysts at the CIA that these individuals sensed they were being lied to? That the dark secret the government was hiding was that UFOs really were from outer space? Or was an elite group with a need-to-know allowing — perhaps even fostering — exactly this kind of conjecture among analysts because it was better to have insiders on a wild-goose chase than to have them on the trail leading to the original enigma of Area 51?