CIA Claims the U2 Was Responsible for All or Most of 1950's and 1960's UFO Sightings

a reply to: TopCat1

The CIA statement is redundant.

We all know that a great percentage of UFO sightings are ordinary phenomenon, which obviously includes the CIA and some of their death machines…so what.

They should shut up since they have no credibility and anything from them is unreliable and subject to being misinformation, disinformation, outright lies, and just pure propaganda for nefarious purposes.

a reply to: Willtell

Agreed. Star for you too.

I wonder what a U2 plane or an SR71 would look like from the ground up? I mean, looking at a commercial airliner at cruise height, and then think the double distance with a smaller airplane designed not to be seen as much as possible? Having seen the "James May to the moon" series and its beautiful footage from above i cannot imagine beeing able to spot an airplane at the ground.

Is any imagery available of a U2 from ground up?

a reply to: tomra

This might be as good a picture as you're gonna find. I don't know how high it is in this one but it gives you a little bit of an idea.

a reply to: justwanttofly

I'd say he's still climbing in that pic. Below 40,000 IMO.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Right. At full altitude, it would look exactly the same color as the sky up there (dark) and have no contrail.

nice, exactly my thoughts a reply to: RoScoLaz4

a reply to: justwanttofly

Thanks for the image :-)
I actually searched the web using various search engines and came up with nothing.

Zaphod58, you probably would have posted it by now if you had any examples safe for public use, appreciate the comment!

So, next question, has anyone around here actually a confirmed observation of any of the two aircraft at cruise altitude and does it resemble the above posted image visually?

a reply to: tomra

I've seen them, barely, passing through 37,000 feet. You can't see a U-2 at cruising altitude with the naked eye. At 37,000 they're a tiny black speck that people with 20/20 vision have trouble seeing. I could only see them as easily as I did because I have better than 20/20 with my glasses on.

I will say that given an unrestricted climb, you've never seen anything climb like a U-2. Out of Hickam, he'd go towards Honolulu, point the nose up, and by the time he did a 180, and came back over the base, he was passing through 30,000. Sadly all my pics are in a box on 35mm.

Unlikely. The Washington UFO Flap of 1952, the Swedish Ghost Rockets. Not unless they had fleets and fleets and fleets of U2s. Just to many UFOs en masse for this to be right. Of course this smacks of the usual "Hey it was just us" stories that keep coming out. You sort of have to wonder if there is some sort of inferiority complex that makes this agency desperate to take credit for whatever they can.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thanks for sharing Zaphod58, really!
I guess it would be safe to suggest then that although a UFO observation certainly could be an actual U2 mission the probablity is fairly low as it would be seen as an airplane at low altitude and not seen at all at cruise altitude.

a reply to: tomra

The early U-2s cruised about 60,000 feet, and were painted silver. The later models were stretched and given more powerful engines which allowed them to cruise closer to 80,000 and were painted black.

You still wouldn't see the early ones at cruising altitude, but what you would occasionally see was a flash of sunlight off the fuselage, and there you go. You suddenly have a UFO.

It certainly wouldn't account for all of them, but a surprising number were test flights of the U-2 and A-12s.

I heard that A-12 made 2,800 flights. Flights were usually conducted several times a day. I remember reading about situation when few F-4 pilots were enough luck to see A-12 during test in the Nevada desert when the aircraft wasn't public yet. FAA radar sites knew about it but didn't report them becase they were classified.

I personally think that U-2 and A-12 were considered as UFOs cause their amazing capabilities for the age when these planes started to fly.

originally posted by: TheLaughingGod

Not even gonna expend any energy pointing out how flawed this claim is, on the face of it this is just a very obvious bold-faced lie.

Here's a relevant post about the claims a while back -unfortunately one of the links doesn't work anymore.

I'm assuming your basing your opinion on the claim made by Gerald K. Haines in 1997 - have you ever checked its veracity?

1997--The CIA and Spy Planes

In a report published at about the same time as the Air Force's "crash dummy" revelation, the Central Intelligence Agency tried to write off thousands of UFO reports as mistaken observations of secret spy planes. It ended up writing fiction.

The first demonstrably incorrect statement was that there had been a major increase in UFO reports immediately following the first test flight of the prototype U-2 spy plane in August 1955. A simple count of cases in the files of Project Blue Book (which the CIA admits it used) shows that there had actually been a major decrease.

Then the CIA claimed that half of almost 9,000 UFO sightings made between mid-1955 and late1969 had been mistaken observations of U-2 and later SR-71 spy planes. Since those airplanes cruise too high to be seen from the ground (at more than 70,000 feet), this could not be the case. Moreover, one of the hallmarks of UFO descriptions in that period was their spectacular maneuvers, including right-angle turns at high speed. Both the U-2 and the SR-71 are among the least maneuverable airplanes used by the U.S. military.

Thirdly, the CIA claimed it had conspired with the staff of the Air Force's Project Blue Book to conceal the alleged sightings of spy planes by having them falsely labeled as obscure types of atmospheric phenomena. Had this been the case, several thousand UFO reports for 1955 - 1969 in the permanent files of Project Blue Book would be blamed on ice crystals, temperature inversions, and so on. But the actual total is barely three dozen.

Why the CIA would invent such an easily disproved story is unknown

link

The phrase 'demonstrably incorrect' is used in the article from the Coalition for Freedom of Information website so I guess all it's a matter of doing is checking if there actually was an increase or decrease in reports after August 1955; if hallmarks of UFO reports from that era actually did involve highly unusual flight characteristics; if the CIA actually did conspire with Project Blue Book to mislabel alleged U2 sightings as 'obscure types of atmospheric phenomena' and if the total number of these alleged Bluebook reports is only actually three dozen.

Below is another relevant article which also bring up the points that the spy plane flights were too few in number to account for all the alleged UFO reports; that the flights were carried out in areas far from public view and that the U-2 and A-12 flew at very high altitudes and were difficult to detect with the naked eye - there's also an interesting snippet concerning the then Project Bluebook Chief Robert Friend:

In 1997, Haines claimed that the CIA used UFO reports as cover for spy planes such as the U-2, and that the Air Force knowingly went along with this deception. Always ready to accept CIA material, the `New York Times' ingested the story - hook, line, and sinker. And thus another bogus claim became historical fact.

There are many problems with the claim. First, the CIA is never a credible source about its own history. After all, it is in business to deceive. Second, spy plane flights were too few in number to account for many UFO reports and they were carried out in areas far from public view. Third, the black U-2 and A-12 "Oxcart" flew at very high altitudes and were difficult to detect both visually and (in the case of the A-12) on radar. Fourth, UFO reports of the era bear little if any resemblance to the flight characteristics of high-altitude spy planes.

But most fatally, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert Friend, head of the Air Force's Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963, later said there is absolutely no truth to the CIA's claims. Not only was Haines wrong about an agreement between the CIA and Air Force but Friend said he never received a single UFO report that he thought could be attributed to a spy plane.

link

Also this article from Space.com quoting UFO cynic Robert Sheaffer.

The CIA tweet has sparked its own UFO flap: Several analysts dispute the CIA assertion that U-2 flights really caused upward of half of UFO sightings.

"One thing this CIA UFO claim has accomplished: It has united UFO skeptics and proponents in proclaiming it untrue," Robert Sheaffer, author and well-known UFO cynic, wrote in a blog post last week. "We might agree on little else, except that this claim is nonsense."

Sheaffer explains that the Project Blue Book files are now public records, allowing anyone to verify when and where sightings were reported.

"The bottom line is: There is absolutely no correlation between the times and places of UFO reports and U-2 flights," he wrote.

A similar view about the CIA assertion is held by UFO photo analyst Bruce Maccabee, who analyzed the data and concluded that the CIA's explanation is "preposterous."

The statistics "do not bear out the claim that there was a large increase in sightings by any segment of the population, pilots and air traffic controllers included, once the U-2 aircraft started flying," Maccabee wrote in a recent blog post.

Sheaffer also argues that the CIA's claim that the U-2 flights led to the creation of Project Blue Book does not hold water, "because Blue Book predates the U-2 flights by several years. Other Air Force projects to investigate 'flying saucer' sightings were created several years earlier still."

link

Cheers.

But in reality, in the early days, no doubt some "Sightings" were of the U2.
And of Early satellites, streaking across the night sky.
People still mistake, meteors as a "UFO"....and Venus or other stars....even on this sight, we have had excited people talk about flashing lights in the sky, only to discover it is a bright morning star.....all quite innocently mistaken as "Something else"
The REAL cases are the interesting ones....photos of saucers (that are not hubcaps), real encounters electromagnetic interference, control tower tracking, pilot close observation, Air force interaction etc.

But most of these reports are hidden or have "Disappeared" over the years by authorities.