FBI Files

Book charts FBI-UFO connection
By Sally Suddock. June 5, 2000

In his own commentary on the book sent to UFO subscriber lists on the Web last week, Maccabee offered a sneak preview of some of the facts he learned in the process of researching and writing UFOs and the FBI: The Secret History of the Government Cover-Up. Among them:

• July 10, 1947, Air Force Intelligence asked the FBI to interview witnesses (of alien landing at Roswell). The Air Force was worried that some sighting reports might come from communist sympathizers.
• The FBI officially investigated during the late summer of 1947. The FBI interviewed a dozen and a half or so witnesses and found no evidence of communist sympathizers, but did find unexplainable sightings. Many of these interviews and sighting reports were filed under "Security Matter - X". ... so these are the "Real X Files."
• Air Force Intelligence supplied the FBI with secret UFO-related information from the summer of 1947 until the middle of the 1950's. Some of this information did not appear in the files of Project Blue Book (1952-1969) which include the files of Project Sign (1948) and Project Grudge (1949-1951), or in the Air Force .
• Information supplied to the FBI during the years 1949-1950 indicated that the Air Force treated the subject seriously even though the Air Force publicly stated that the sightings could all be explained and that there was no threat to the United States.
• In January 1949 an Air Force Colonel at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who directed the project to create and atomic powered aircraft, told the FBI that saucers were real and were weapons of the Soviet Union.
• In 1949 and 1950 the FBI was told by the Air Force intelligence that the saucer project had been ended. But then the FBI received further requests for sighting information which proved that the Air Force was still investigating. The confusion of the Air Force investigators over whether or not saucers were weapons of another nation or something else is evident in the FBI file.
• 1949 and 1950 numerous "green fireballs" were observed flying over restricted military installations in New Mexico and Texas. These military installations were associated with the construction and storage of atomic weapons. The security agencies were very worried that these "fireballs" were Soviet missiles. The Air Force reports also indicate a "disc shaped variation" also reported by Air Force security personnel. The local FBI agents reported numerous times to headquarters (Hoover) about these sightings. In 1950 the AF project set up to investigate these sightings (Project Twinkle) obtained "photographic proof" of saucer reality. This proof is presented publicly for the first time in this book.
• On July 29,1952, a week after saucers appeared over Washington, DC, the FBI was told by Air Force Intelligence that roughly 3 percent of the sightings could not be explained and that it was "not entirely impossible" that some saucers were "ships from another planet." On the same day the General in charge of Air Force Intelligence ( General Samford) held a press conference and told the American public that sightings were all explainable as natural phenomena such as mirages and "temperature inversions" (affecting radar).
• In October, 1952, the FBI was told that some AF officers were "seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships."
• The FBI file has a memorandum which indicates that when Jimmy Carter became President he did query government agencies about their UFO activities, as he had promised before the election.

Maccabee says that, while the FBI does not now investigate sightings, it's "placed on the web the roughly 1600 pages of UFO files (at www.foia.fbi.gov and check for "foipa" documents.) These are not arranged in any order so if you are looking for a particular item you may have to search through all 16 files of 5 Mbytes each." Or, a better solution for investigating the pattern of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's UFO activity might be Maccabee's book.