Robarge said, is to release information as objectively as it can, including both successes and failures. first made public a batch of documents about U.F.O.s in the late 1970s, the press suggested that the government was continuing the cover-up. The fuzzy Navy videos of recent years that show some unexplained phenomena resonated with the public much as reports of sightings 50 years earlier. Those Cold War anxieties, featuring both the possibility of planetary destruction and the threat of Russian disinformation, have echoes in the current day. groups were stalking horses for the K.G.B.,” Dr. “None of that ever panned out there is absolutely no evidence that any of these U.F.O. enthusiast groups that were pestering the American government for details about military capabilities and secret programs.
The United States was also concerned that the K.G.B. If the Soviets were to attack, the agency worried, it might be mistaken for an alien visitation, causing the public not to take shelter but to flood local authorities with false reports. documents also show concern about the public’s obsession with aliens in the 1950s. has been worried about the American public’s vulnerability to Russian disinformation. Its failure to find affirmative evidence of alien spaceships will largely be ignored by those most passionate about theories of extraterrestrial visitation.įrom soon after its creation, the C.I.A. Due out on Friday, the report’s expected assertion that no classified American programs exist to explain the observations will most likely be dismissed by those primed to disbelieve government pronouncements. The government’s latest report on U.F.O.s, which the Pentagon now wants to call unidentified aerial phenomena, is unlikely to settle anything. After the Cold War, a pair of Air Force reports that aimed to come clean about the experiments near Roswell did little to debunk any belief in the potential for aliens. Since then, Americans’ passion for alien visitation has proved tough to shake, even when the evidence is clear that no spaceships have touched down or crash landed. The military gave only incomplete accounts of what happened, sowing decades of conspiracy theories (and a tourism industry) that built up around Roswell as the site of an alien crash landing. military balloon developed to spy on the Soviet nuclear program crashed in the desert near Roswell, N.M. WASHINGTON - In the summer of 1947, a top-secret U.S.