Walter Bedell Smith served as director of Central Intelligence from 1950 to 1953, and there were few men more trusted by President Harry Truman and five-star general of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. Years earlier, when General Eisenhower had been serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe during World War II, Bedell Smith was his chief of staff. A handful of Smith’s closest colleagues affectionately called him Beetle, but most men were intimidated by the person privately referred to as Eisenhower’s “hatchet man.” So forceful was Bedell Smith that when George S. Patton needed discipline, the task fell on Bedell Smith’s shoulders. When the Nazis surrendered to the Allied Forces, it was Bedell Smith who was in charge of writing up acceptable terms.
From the earliest days of the Cold War, General Walter Bedell Smith fought the Russians from America’s innermost circle of power. He had served as President Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1948, a position that uniquely qualified him to be the second director of the CIA. Intelligence on the Soviet Union was the CIA’s primary concern in the early days of the Cold War, and there was nothing the U.S. government knew regarding what the Russians were up to that Bedell Smith did not have access to. The conundrum for Smith when he took over the role of director of Central Intelligence on August 21, 1950, was that very few people at the CIA had a need-to-know what the general now knew regarding unidentified flying objects. The record that has been declassified thus far suggests that Bedell Smith demanded that all his employees accept what his personal experiences with the Russians and “UFOs” had taught him: the Communists were evil, and this idea that UFOs were coming from other planets was nothing but the fantasy of panicked, paranoid minds. General Smith summarily rejected the idea that UFOs were anything out of this world and he spearheaded CIA policy accordingly. “Preposterous,” he wrote in a memo in 1952. Unlike Dulles, Bedell Smith personally oversaw the national security implications regarding UFOs at the CIA.
To a rationalist like General Smith, “Strange things in the sky [have] been recorded for hundreds of years,” which is true—unidentified flying objects are at least as old as the Bible. In certain translations of the Old Testament, a reference to “Ezekiel’s wheel” describes a saucerlike vehicle streaking across the skies. During the Middle Ages, flying discs appeared in many different forms of art, such as in paintings and mosaics. In British ink prints from 1783, favored examples among ufologists, two of the king’s men stand on the terrace of Windsor Castle in London observing small saucers flying in the background; researchers have not been able to identify what they might have referenced. Smith could offer no “obvious… single explanation for a majority of the things seen” in the sky and cited foo fighters as an example, the “unexplained phenomena sighted by aircraft pilots during World War II.” These, Smith explained, were “balls of light… similar to St. Elmo’s fire.”
Like the president’s science adviser Vannevar Bush, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith was primarily concerned about the government’s ability to maintain control. Toward this end, he saw the CIA as having to take decisive action regarding citizen hysteria over UFOs. During Bedell Smith’s tenure, and according to declassified documents, it was the position of the CIA that a nefarious plan was in the Soviet pipeline. It had happened once already, at Roswell. Fortunately, in that instance the Joint Chiefs had been able to cover up the truth with a weather balloon story. But a black propaganda attack could happen again, a grand UFO hoax aimed at paralyzing the nation’s early air-defense warning system, which would then make the United States vulnerable to an actual Soviet air attack. “Mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication quite irrelevant to hostile objects might some day appear” as real, Smith ominously warned the National Security Council. The unending UFO sightings preoccupying the nation were becoming like the boy who cried wolf, the CIA director cautioned.