According to
Defense Tech, most UFO reports, discredited for so long, were actually legitimate sightings of US military
surveillance flights.
According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
Why would anyone report a U2 as a UFO?
The early U-2s were silver (they were later painted black) and reflected the rays from the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset. They often appeared as fiery objects to observers below.
I leave it to those who compile statistics on flying saucers to say how many glowing UFOs were sighted under these conditions and how many appeared to be luminous on their own account. Note also the wording in Patent 3,713,157 which says that the plasma cloud produces a combination of ‘absorbtion, reflection, refraction and diffraction’ across frequencies including visible spectrum, which would certainly alter the appearance of an aircraft, perhaps to the point of making it an unrecognisable blob.
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The article later mentions:
Radioactive coatings would cause a major disposal problems. It is alleged that workers at Groom lake - 'Area 51' - were harmed by carcinogens dumped there. The suit was dismissed in 1996 because for reasons of security the materials involved could not be disclosed.
More disinformation from the Air Force?
Many have commented on a photograph of a B-2 from Edwards AFB (published in Air Forces Monthly in October 2000) in which the wing seems to be enveloped in a faint glowing cloud. This was explained by the Air Force as water vapor, but some commentators have argued that such a cloud would not form simultaneously above and below the wing.
See also the discussion and perhaps anomalous picture here.
Since the majority of UFO reports have now been admitted by the CIA to have been military flights, one wonders how many of those remaining were really the quacks they were presented as, and how many were also legitimate other sighthings that the CIA has yet to admit, other projects that have yet to be made public, hidden under further disinformation and discrediting.