The aliens will have to wait: the CIA declassified documents relating to "Area 51" and UFOs

Area 51 was a base from which test flights and reconnaissance flights of planes that reached an altitude of 60 feet took off. The reason for the reports in the evening was that these planes were lit while the passenger planes were at a lower altitude and the ground surface was in darkness

The American intelligence agency, the CIA, allowed the publication of a 355-page document that admits that there is a reserved area in the state of Nevada known as Area 51, and that the agency came clean in its explanations about weather balloons. The document covers the U-51 and SR-2 spy plane programs as well as the OXCART aerial photography project that operated between 71-1954.

However, to the disappointment of UFO and conspiracy enthusiasts, aliens are not and have not been held at the secret site.

The documents were released this week in accordance with a request under the Freedom of Information Act submitted in 2005 by a man named Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archives. Originally, the CIA disclosed a censored document, in which all references to the existence of Area 51 were blacked out. The current document reveals almost everything, except for the names of military personnel and civilians who were involved.

The current report was issued after Richelson convinced authorities that the location of Area 51 in Nevada was not really a well-kept secret. The location appears in Levin photographs such as Google Maps and Google Earth as well as in books containing aerial photographs.

Area 51 was the subject that fascinated the lovers of conspiracy theories and paranormal experiences, and it entered the popular culture of UFOlogy. However, the newly declassified information (and surprisingly with very little redaction) admits that the base was a secret testing facility for aircraft during the Cold War, and the technologies developed there were used to track the Soviet Union.

It is estimated that the flow of reports on UFO sightings in this area increased during test flights, but this was an unexpected byproduct, the document said.
Test flights of U-2 aircraft from high altitudes led to an increase in the number of reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). In the mid-10s, most airliners flew at 20-47 feet and military aircraft such as the B-57 and B-40 operated at 2 feet. As soon as the U-60 planes reached an altitude of XNUMX feet, air traffic controllers in the area began to receive reports of UFOs.

The document also explains the source of the claims that appear in the Blue Book Project and other UFO stories. The Blue Book project was actually intended to find out when UFO reports received from the public coincided with U-2 aircraft flights and to think about how to prevent this phenomenon in the future.

Have civilians on the ground or even other pilots reported glowing UFOs? The document explains that the silver wings of the U-2s were at the right height so that people on the ground or even lower-altitude pilots who were in the dark could see the bright wings of the U-2s as they reflected the sunlight, which had not yet set at that height. They were found (similar to the observations that can be made today on the space station in the hours after sunset, when the height at which it is still light AB).

Indeed such reports were common in the early evening hours from airliner pilots moving from east to west. When the sun sank below the horizon for a plane flying at an altitude of 20 feet, the plane was in darkness, but for a U-2 plane at an altitude of 60 feet, flying above the same point, the sun was still above the horizon and appeared to the pilot 40 feet below as a bright object. Even during the day, the silver body of the U-2's high-altitude aircraft caught sunlight and reflected it so that it was visible from low altitude or even from the ground. Back in the day, no one believed that manned flights could reach such a high altitude, so no one expected to see a man-made object so high in the sky.

However, not all UFO reports can be explained by U-2 flights. Air Force researchers tried to explain some of the sightings as related to natural events. The aforementioned Blue Book researchers turned to Washington and asked to cross-check the data about the U-2 flights. This allowed them to put aside most of the UFO reports, even though they could not reveal to the letter writers the real reason for these sightings. U-2 flights and later also OXCART are responsible for more than half of the UFO reports in the late fifties and most of the sixties.

In the document the CIA admitted that the weather balloon story was only a cover story but that it was standard operating procedure for explaining sightings as well as debris from any crashes. But this cover story was disastrous in May 1960 when a U-2 crashed in Russia and its pilot Gary Powers was captured. This caused a lack of trust between the US and the Soviet Union that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

At that time the fate of the plane was unknown and the pilot was declared missing. The CIA and NASA announced that a weather plane drifted into Russia and crashed after the pilot died from lack of oxygen. The story was soon proven to be a hoax when the Soviets exposed the crash of the U-2 and the pilot who survived the crash and was accused of espionage.
If you are interested in the history of aviation and military history, the report may interest you. An interesting fact that was revealed is that President Eisenhower requested that the pilots of these planes not be American citizens, and when a U-2 plane falls in the territories of the Soviet Union, it will be a curse for the United States to deny any connection to the activity if the pilot is not American." said in the report.

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