Cia Real Plan Nine From Outer Space

Philippe Mora has a well written piece about the CIA and UFOs that was published today at Sydney Morning Herald. Instead of offering up completely unsubstantiated "SERPO slop," Mora reviews recently declassified CIA documents that offer an inside view of Agency interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation.Mora writes, "A raft of newly unclassified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack."Our previous revelation at this blog of the UFO Working Group ended with a source requesting, "Do not ask me about this again," suggesting that someone, somewhere, was upset about the attention brought to bear against hidden interest in UFOs.We had been following up on a book by reporter Howard Blum, published in the 1990s. Gus Russo later claimed to have obtained a document with a list of names of persons in attendance at one working group meeting.Some of Mora's digging lead to documents familiar to us from the CIA files; other items were new to us, deserving of follow-up at our end.One item in particular was a secret group called the "ONE."Mora writes:Intriguingly, the unclassified documents show that within the CIA, there was an uber-intelligence group called ONE, created by a CIA director, General William Bedell Smith. His tenure spanned the period between October 1950 and January 1953. These documents confirm that ONE was concerned with UFOs.Other minor tidbits are also intriguing. According to Mora:A 1953 memo shows that the physicist John Wheeler, while critically involved with Edward Teller in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, was available to the "CIA attack on the flying saucer" problem. The urgency of the H-bomb race was his priority, but he "would be pleased at any time to discuss the issue briefly", the memo said.Wheeler recommended two "foreign nationals" who could help with the "problem", including the "mysterious problems of ion paths and magnetic focusing" and "cosmological electrodynamics."Mora also addresses some of the reasons behind CIA interest in the UFO phenomena. One example comes from a letter to the Director of Central Intelligence:On October 2, 1952, General Smith received this ominous note from his Office of Scientific Intelligence:"Flying saucers pose two elements of danger which have national security implications. The first involves mass psychological considerations and the second concerns the vulnerability of the US to air attack."Check out the entire article here.Check out the CIA document archive here.