Claims by the CIA of a ‘tremendous’ increase in reports of UFOs when the U2 spy plane started flying in 1955 are wrong according to a former US Navy optical physicist, Dr Bruce Maccabee.
In a new book containing the formerly classified history of the U2, the writers, Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, claim that the USAF received a greatly increased number of UFO sighting reports from pilots and ground based observers after the U2 began test flights on August 8, 1955.
According to Dr. Maccabee, the numbers of sightings per month received by the USAF’s Project Blue Book, as reported in the Final Report of the Scientific Investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects (Air Force Contract F44620-67-C-0035, E. U. Condon, Director; Bantam Books edition, 1969, pg 514) totally contradict the CIA claim.
According to the Final Report the number of sighting reports in July, before the U2 started flying, was 63. In August, when U2 test flights began, the number was 68, an increase of only 5 or about 8%. Then, in September, there was a decrease to 57 reports, a drop of almost 20%, even though the U2 continued to fly. Averaged over a longer time the statistics show little or no impact of the U2 flights on sighting rate.
In his book, The FBI CIA UFO Connection
published last September, Dr. Maccabee shows that the number of UFO sightings reports for 10 months preceding the first U2 flights is the same as the number of reports collected during the ten months following the first flight. ‘These statistics clearly do not support the claim of a ‘tremendous’ increase in UFO reports when the U2 began flying,’ Dr Maccabee said.
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