The Director of Central Intelligence, an authoritative man in late middle age, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, summarized. Unidentified Flying Objects, called UFO's, have been of intermittent concern to the CIA and the Air Force, especially in the '50s and '60s, in part because rumors about them might be a means for a hostile power to spread confusion or to overload communications channels. A few of the more reliably reported incidents turned out to be penetrations of U.S. air space or overflights of U.S. overseas bases by high-performance aircraft from the Soviet Union or Cuba. Such overflights are a common means of testing a potential adversary's readiness, and the United States had more than its fair share of penetrations, and feints at penetrations, of Soviet air space. A Cuban MiG penetrating 200 miles up the Mississippi Basin before being detected was considered undesirable publicity by NORAD. The routine procedure had been for the Air Force to deny that any of its aircraft were in the vicinity of the UFO sightings, and to volunteer nothing about unauthorized penetrations, thus solidifying public mystification. At these explanations, the Air Force Chief of Staff looked marginally uncomfortable but said nothing.

The great majority of UFO reports, the DCI continued, were natural objects misapprehended by the observer. Unconventional or experimental aircraft, automobile headlights reflected off overcast, balloons, birds, luminescent insects, even planets and stars seen under unusual atmospheric conditions, had all been reported as UFO's. A significant number of reports turned out to be hoaxes or real psychiatric delusions. There had been more than a million UFO sightings reported worldwide since the term "flying saucer" had been invented in the late '40s, and not one of them seemed on good evidence to be connected with an extraterrestrial visitations. But the idea generated powerful emotions, and there were fringe groups and publications, and even some academic scientists, who kept alive the supposed connection between UFO's and life on other worlds. Recent millenarian doctrine included its share of saucer-borne extraterrestrial redeemers. The official Air Force investigation, called in one of its final incarnations Project Blue Book, had been closed down in the '60s for lack of progress, although a low-level continuing interest had been maintained jointly by the Air Force and the CIA. The scientific community had been so convinced there was nothing to it that when Jimmy Carter requested the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to make a comprehensive study of UFO's, NASA uncharacteristically refused a presidential request.

"In fact," interjected one of the scientists at the table, unfamiliar with the protocol in meetings such as this, "the UFO business has made it more difficult to do serious SETI work."

Carl Sagan, Contact
Copyright © 1985 by Carl Sagan. All rights reserved.

Posted 24 August 1997

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