US lost to USSR in race for downed UFO

Here's one for the history archives, and I've not found any corroborating evidence or further esplaination. But what is available in public documents is tantalizing.

Now, I'm referring this as a UFO in the broadest sense. What exactly this was we may never know -- whether manmade object, natural object, or a true holy grail of alien intelligence.

Here's the backdrop.

Back in the Cold War, the Air Force operated a program known as Project Moon Dust -- a super secret project, what little info that has been released regarding it indicates that it was a rapid response force that would hunt and capture downed space objects. A good backgrounder with supporting docs can be found here.

Now obstensibly, the quest was to capture and study where the then-Soviet Union was on its space technology, and to recover any U.S. space objects to prevent them from falling into the enemy's hands.

But this left Moon Dust's charter open to the recapture and recovery of all space objects and UFOs.

Very little documentation has been offered regarding this program. I detailed an incident in the 1970s where Moon Dust recovered a space object in South Africa.

But along comes this document I found in the National Security Archives.

If you scroll down to page 18, there's a brief entry regarding Moondust and its 1967 monitoring of Soviet space objects.

And then there's a large portion redacted. If you read further down, you see the real interesting thing: The US and USSR both chased what I assume was a downed space object in the Middle East in 1967. Because we weren't very popular there then either, the Soviets -- using 13 of their scientists -- won out and obtained the object. Nothing else is known on the incident.

Now, here's some assumptions I'm going to draw: This object was not necessarily produced by either the U.S. or the USSR, especially since both were on a quest for it. And since they were the two sole super powers, very few other countries at that time had embarked upon any sort of space program.

So...what was the object?