Wright - The CIA UFO Papers: 50 Years of Government Secrets and Cover-Ups

This edition first published in 2019 by MUFON, an imprint of
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
With offices at:
65 Parker Street, Suite 7
Newburyport, MA 01950
www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2019 by Dan Wright
Foreword copyright 2019 by Jan Harzan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-59003-302-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request.

Cover design by Kathryn Sky-Peck
Cover image by iStock
Interior by Steve Amarillo/Urban Design LLC
Typeset in Minion Pro and Gotham

Printed in Canada
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This work is dedicated to the memory of the late
Walter H. Andrus Jr., cofounder and thirty-year-long
International Director of the Mutual UFO Network, Inc.
Walt served as my mentor and remained a true friend.
If only we could interview him today to discover what
else he has learned about non-human intelligences.

Shortly after taking office as the Executive Director for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, I received a congratulatory email from Dan Wright, former Director of Investigations for MUFON in the 80s and 90s. It was a heartfelt moment, as I had followed Dan through his MUFON career and even heard him speak at a MUFON Symposium or two but had lost touch with him through the intervening years. He was writing to congratulate me on my new position and to offer his help with anything I might need. And there are always things that need to be done in any volunteer organization. I thanked him for his offer and told him I would keep him in mind as opportunities arose.

Then in January of 2017 I received another email from Dan inquiring what MUFON planned to do with the million or so UFO documents the CIA had just dumped onto the internet. Or at least that was the headline in an online publication announcing this momentous event. My first thought was that's a whole lot of documents and it will take a team of MUFON volunteers years to weed through it, but Dan insisted it needed to be done and he would be happy to lead the charge. How could I turn him down!

After a short discussion we agreed that he would make a first pass and see what the size and scope of the project looked like. After a few weeks I received another email from Dan stating that he had just scratched the surface but that he was finding some interesting facts about the million UFO documents on the CIA website. The first was that it was nowhere close to a million documents, but more like 20,000 or so documents placed in the CIA's Electronic Reading Room (ERR) on the UFO subject. The second was that many of the documents had nothing to do with UFOs. It was as if a machine had gone through the massive CIA archives and pulled out anything with the letters U-F-O in that order in a document and placed it in the reading room under the heading UFO.

At that point Dan suggested that he dive in and take the first few years in the archive, since the documents were ordered chronologically, and give it a try to see what the effort would be like. And so, the journey began, Dan taking one to five years at a time, pulling the documents which might number one or two hundred and reading through them one by one to discern, first, was it UFO related, and second, what was the purpose of the document including when it was written, by whom, and for what purpose. It might be good here to remember the mission statement of the CIA, this coming from their website,... to further US national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters, producing objective all-source analysis,... and safeguarding the secrets that help keep our Nation safe.

The actions of the CIA with regard to UFOs was primarily gathering information on UFO events through public sources, and spending a good amount of time keeping track of individuals and organizations that were publicly following and actively pursuing the UFO subject. It's all documented here in the CIA's own documents. In the pages that follow are Dan's detailed and painstaking efforts to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide you the with the mother lode of what is in the CIA's files about the UFO subject. In doing so he has included everything that is UFO related that the CIA made public. It's all here for you in one simple body of work. He's done the hard work and provided it for you on a platter called The CIA UFO Papers. I hope you enjoy this fascinating look behind the veil of the CIA and what they are sharing with the public as much as I did.

Jan C. Harzan
Executive Director
MUFON, Mutual UFO Network

As an Obama farewell before his second term expired, on January 17, 2017, the Central Intelligence Agency made available on its permanent website (www.cia.gov) a great cache of electronic files previously released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) housed at the National Archivesavailable for inspection onsite only. Among a variety of subject matters: unidentified flying objects. Finally, serious UFO researchers had a stockpile of reports and correspondence available to examine at home.

Wading into this volume of material, two things became immediately evident. First, the documents were in no particular ordernot chronologically, not by topic, not by office or other source. More importantly, the great share of documents had no bearing whatsoever on the subject of aerial phenomena. While one might be curious about just what Bulgaria's total rail tonnage was in 1956, it would not advance the cause of UFO research. Nonetheless, sharp eyes and perseverance won the day. When the sorting was finished, 550 files were shown to be useful.

All base documents are listed in chronological order, beginning with the World War II years. Attachments are often from an earlier date.

Capitalized file identifiers, such as Office Memorandum, or Letter, indicate the document as presented was on formal Agency masthead (letterhead or memo-head)definitely not a draft.

The Agency was amazingly inaccurate in dating its files. The Publication Date listed on the introductory web page for each document very often preceded by a few or several weeks the actual event discussed or the date typed on the correspondence. If a date is shown on the document itself, that is used here. Certain types of documents do not include such a date of origin. For those, or if the publication date was obviously incorrect, the earlier of either a Release Date or Distribution Date is substituted.

Regarding document numbering, three Agency numbering schemes were used over six decades. In those with (yes) 27 digits, variously two or three hyphens were inserted by the Agency. Two types of 10-digit numbers were also employed. This often resulted in document duplication, meaning the file was listed under one scheme, then later an identical file was included under another scheme. Care has been taken to eliminate duplicates.

AD/SI: Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence

ADC: USAF Air Defense Command

A/DDS&T: Assistant Deputy Director for Science and Technology