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CIA UFO Sightings: Agency Claims At Least Half Of 1950s And 60s Incidents Were Spy Planes

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 14:33 PST, Dec 30, 2014

As the CIA tweets links to its most read documents in 2014, the agency has noted that they were responsible for fully half of the UFO sightings reported in the 1950s and 1960s, which were in actuality U-2 spy planes.

The CIA tweeted on Monday that its most read document of 2014 detailed UFO sightings which took place in the middle of the 20th century, incidents that in many cases directly correlated with tests of the U-2 spy plane, as the Daily Mail reports. Operating at altitudes of over 60,000 feet, once believed to be an impossible height, the U-2 planes were developed for high-altitude photography and flew from secret bases in California and Nevada.

The CIA quickly realized that sightings of UFOs correlated with U-2 test flights, but chose to not inform the public of the reality behind what they were observing. As Venture Beat reports, the document, The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974, written in 1998, reveals that a multitude of pilots mistook the spy planes for UFOs.

“High-altitude testing of the U-2 … led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects,” it states.

“In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and [many] military aircraft … operated at altitudes below 40,000 feet. Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.”

The document also alleges that the CIA cross-referenced UFO sightings with U-2 mission logs, in order to determine the degree of correlation between the two.

“This enabled the investigators to eliminate the majority of the UFO reports,” the CIA noted, “although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause of the UFO sightings.”

Earlier this month, a series of mysterious noises, similar to explosions, were heard over Britain, and at the same time, western New York state. Though a range of explanations were offered, from the mundane to the extreme (including UFOs), the strange sounds were seemingly linked to a new type of engine thought to be employed by a secret spy plane, as the Inquisitr previously noted.

In addition to the UFO document, the CIA’s top ten list included information on a surveillance program that employed cameras strapped to pigeons, details of which still remain classified.

[Image via UPI/ Twitter]

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