CIA claims responsibility for UFO sightings
The declassified but still redacted memo can be found here:
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-t...974/u2.pdf
Warning: The misinformation/spin/lying/polyanna begins in the Foreward. The author falsely implies that Eisenhower expressly forbid U-2 flights over Russia only AFTER Gary Powers was shot down. I wonder if the rest of the manuscript corrects this mistake. Somehow, I doubt it.
Right. Because the spy planes and UFOs have the same flight characteristics. Not. :
:
True. The U-2 was such a fragile aircraft that it had a very limited envelope of operation, (at the beginning) a 6 knot air-speed envelope between "stall" and "wings break off" (later improved to 20 knots). It was designed to handle only half the G forces all other military planes could take, so it couldn't turn fast or dive or climb steeply. Furthermore, there is a limited window of time in which the U2 flew covertly, 1956 to 1960. Plus, there never were very many of them made.
These limitations truly mean that only a tiny fraction of mysterious UFO reports could be rationally imputed to the U2. The two really interesting thing about this release is the appearance of many familiar names to the JFK case: Dulles, Bissel, Twining, Lemay, Charles Cabell, Bell Aircraft, to name a few; and the fact that the U2 story shows that both the CIA and the military were quite prepared to, and practiced at, disregarding Eisenhower's orders, as well as Kennedy's.
Bruce Maccabee, a retired Navy optical physicist, and UFO researcher, is one who questions the U-2's role in the frequency of UFO sightings.
"Their claim is straightforward, that, once the U-2 started flying, more than 50 percent of UFO sightings were actually of the high-flying U-2 (spy aircraft). But if you look at the actual statistics, the number of sightings reported per month, for three years before and after, you find there's no big increase as a result of the U-2 flights," Maccabee, author of "
The FBI-CIA-UFO Connection," told The Huffington Post.
"Oddly enough, according to the official government's
Condon report statistics, there were 430 [UFO] sightings in 10 months before the U-2 started flying, and 430 during the 10 months after. That astonished me as much as anybody else. To claim that more than 50 percent of sightings [were reported] after the U-2 started flying, is a complete canard."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia-...weird-news