CIA feared alien invasion more than Soviet nuclear attack

CIA feared alien invasion more than Soviet nuclear attack

Photo: CIA feared alien invasion more than Soviet nuclear attack

A raft of newly unclassified CIA documents reveal that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than a Soviet nuclear attack.

More interesting still, the CIA documents show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds which implicated the highest levels of the US government.

The subject of UFOs and dabbling in psychological warfare techniques not only focused the attention of the US elite levels for 50 years but some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era were involved in the effort.

A Herald investigation shows that throughout the 1950s, CIA files clearly document an explosion of activity by US intelligence and military bodies concerned with studying every possible implication for the US, and Western democracies, of UFOs.

The phenomenon, so adored by the cinematic world - from mind control and space travel to extra-terrestrial life - was reflected in the CIA's fixations. Indeed, while highly educated CIA employees experimented by giving each other surprise LSD trips in 1953, there were others, in other parts of the agency, dealing with a huge flood of UFO reports.

Significantly, however, after a burst of intense scrutiny in the early '50s, the available documents effectively go cold. Why?

The quintessential Kafkaesque explanation provided is that few files were kept because these would only confirm that the CIA was investigating UFOs. But the wildly eclectic UFO files in fact cover everything from “flying saucers over Belgian Congo uranium mines” to Nazi “flying saucers”.

When The New York Times reported in 1979 that the CIA had investigated UFOs,the news report is said to have so upset the then-CIA director Stansfield Turner that he reportedly asked his staff: “Are we in UFOs?”

The answer then was yes - since the late 1940s apparently. But exactly how, what, when, why and who remained layered in mystery, leaving infinite grist for the conspiracy mill, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

Pravda.Ru has previously published an article “5 reasons for governments to keep UFOs in secret”

Stanton Friedman, a physicist who once worked for such giants as Westinghouse and General Electric, has devoted much of his adult life to ferreting out clues in the UFO controversy.

Pitching his case before more than 600 campus audiences, Friedman concludes that alien aircraft have been around for decades and that governments have tried to keep an airtight lid on them.

He has five reasons for a massive and sustained cover-up that he labels “the cosmic Watergate.”

1. Government agents want to figure out how crashed aircraft work.

2. No one wants any enemy governments to know what has been discovered.

3. If some trusted public figures, say the queen of England and the pope, disclosed UFOs, society would be shaken up, and earthlings would begin thinking of themselves as such, rather than as citizens of individual nations.

4. The fourth problem is the fundamentalist Christian perspective that aliens are “the work of the Devil,” quoting 700 Club founder Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The two said earth contains the only intelligence life in the universe, he said.

5. A public confirmation would lead to economic chaos, and lastly, secrecy is a way of life in government.

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Source: agencies