Mellon, Chris
: The Debrief,
: The Debrief, : The Debrief, There is not a single known sighting of a U-2
reconnaissance plane reported as a UAP. Nothing in the Blue Book files, and no one can even cite a date for one
such purported U-2 sighted and reported as a UAP, let alone the implausible
notion that U-2s accounted for more than half
of all UAP reports: Under the U-2 Aquatone “secret project” entry, AARO
claims More than half of the UFO reports investigated in the 1950s and 1960s were assessed to be U.S.
reconnaissance flights
and that UFO reports would spike when the U-2 was in flight
s1AAROR, p. 41.
Are we to believe over 5,000 of the 10,000 UFO reports then in Air Force Blue Book files were U-2s? That should be easy to find in the Blue Book files if that was the case. (Were there ever that many U-2s anyway, flying say, daily, instead of just one every few months? U-2 historical flight schedules have been released, nothing supports AARO’s claims.)
If so, they should be able to come up with at least one U-2 “UFO” misidentification out of the purported 5,000+ U-2 “UFO” reports, one sighting by date. The earliest unfounded AF-planted rumor of a U-2 “UFO” can be documented in 1964 (see below) but in all this time since they can’t at least find one U-2 “UFO”? (An undated hearsay claim that U-2s could sometimes be seen at sunset is not a “misidentification” – no one said it was an alien spaceship or UFO or the like – and it is not a UAP report that was made by anybody to any official agency, not even to Project Blue Book which has nothing on file about that.)
In fact, it is on record that Air Force Project Blue Book
Chief Capt. (later Lt Col) Hector Quintanilla first
planted the whole false notion of a U-2 “UFO”
sighting on Blue Book’s chief scientific consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek and
his then-grad student assistant Jacques Vallee
on le , when he visited
Chicago and briefed them (see Vallee’s published diaries for en à en , p.
101). Quintanilla claimed a U-2 was sighted and
It was reported as a UFO
in en , purportedly observed as the U-2 was on its way to the Soviet Union
– when in fact the U-2 had not even been invented yet in en let
alone flown yet (invented and designed in en , first flown in en , none flown to the
Soviet Union until en , as anyone can look up).
In tracing the origins of this phony story, it was later in en when the Air Force Foreign Technology Division (FTD), which ran Project Blue Book, planted this bogus U-2 spy plane “UFO” nonsense on the CIA (where
one CIA reconnaissance official, James Cunningham, admitted FTD/Blue Book was in frequent contact with them). Air Force FTD
apparently tried to suggest to the CIA that the secret U-2 flights
accounted for many UAP sightings and, because of the need for secrecy, the public could not be told the U-2 explanation. CIA may have run with it because it boosted the importance
and prestige of their U-2 in the aftermath of the humiliating CIA Bay of
Pigs disaster – and by about this time, the mind-boggling story was embellished that more than half
of all UAP
reports were due to the U-2, not even weather balloons, Venus, or swamp
gas, Blue Book’s usual attempted explanations?
(Knowing how Blue Book and its chief operated back then, from civilian researchers combing through 130,000 pages of Blue Book files and studying badly botched cases, it is very possible that on one date Blue Book happened to receive, say, five supposed “UFO” reports of which, say, three they thought might be of a giant Skyhook balloon, possibly from a classified high-altitude reconnaissance project of some sort. Then someone heard this but got their wires crossed and told someone else down the line of the classic hearsay chain that they thought it was three sightings of a reconnaissance spy “project,” maybe “like” a U-2 spy plane, thus confusing balloons with aircraft, and from there the myth was born. Over “half” – or three out of the five “UFO” reports that day – would have been a balloon; maybe a spy balloon, maybe not, involving perhaps nothing more than a sighting of an ordinary large weather or research balloon. But the “half” statistic for one day would be misheard and massively embellished as half of all 10,000 UAP reports for the decade and beyond. This is sheer speculation but based on the very real, typically careless way Blue Book operated. We may never know the full story.)