To work on the problem of UFO hysteria, in 1952 Bedell Smith convened a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board and gave them the job of putting together recommendations about “problems connected with unidentified flying objects” for the National Security Council—the highest-ranking national security policy makers in the United States. Bedell Smith’s Psychological Strategy Board panel determined that the American public was far too sensitive to “hysterical mass behavior” for the good of the nation. Furthermore, the board said, the public’s susceptibility to UFO belief was a national security threat, one that was increasing by the year. From a psychological standpoint, the public’s gullibility would likely prove “harmful to constituted authority,” meaning the central government might not hold. Any forthcoming UFO hoax by Stalin could engender the same kind of pandemonium that followed the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
Bedell Smith’s CIA told the National Security Council that for this reason, the flying saucer scare needed to be discredited. According to CIA documents declassified in 1993, the Agency proposed a vast “debunking” campaign to reduce the public’s interest in flying saucers. The only way of countering what Bedell Smith was certain was the Russians’ “clever hostile propaganda” was for the CIA to take covert action of its own. The Agency suggested that an educational campaign be put in place, one that would co-opt elements of the American “mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.” The CIA also suggested getting advertising executives, business clubs, and “even the Disney Corporation [involved] to get the message across.” One plan was to present actual UFO case histories on television and then prove them wrong. “As in the case of conjuring tricks,” members of the panel suggested, “the debunking would result in reduction in public interest in flying saucers,” in the same way that those who believe in magic become disillusioned when the magician’s trick is revealed.
What action was actually taken by the CIA remains classified as of 2011, but one unforeseen problem that Bedell Smith’s CIA encountered was an American press wholly uninterested in going along with the wishes of the CIA. The media had an agenda of its own. UFO stories sold papers, and in the spring of 1952, the publishers of Life magazine were getting ready to go to press with a major scoop about UFOs. Reporters for the magazine had learned that the Air Force had been keeping top secret files on flying saucers while insisting to the public it was doing no such thing. It was a big story, likely to sell out copies of the magazine. One week before press time, the Air Force got wind of Life’s story. In a move meant to deflate the magnitude of the magazine’s revelation, the Air Force decided to reverse its five-year position of denying that it had been actively investigating flying discs and to attend, of all things, a UFO convention in Los Angeles, California.
To understand what a radical about-face this was for the Air Force requires an understanding of what the Air Force had been doing for the past five years since it had began the simultaneous and contradictory campaigns Project Sign (to investigate Air Force UFO concerns) and Project Grudge (the public relations campaign intended to convey to the nation that the Air Force had no UFO concerns). Of the 850 UFO sightings reported in the news media the first month of the UFO craze, in July of 1947, at least 150 of the sightings had concerned military intelligence officials to such a degree that they were written up and sent for analysis to officers with the Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Force at Wright Field. Six months later, in January of 1948, General Nathan Twining, head of the Air Force Technical Service Command, established Project Sign; originally called Project Saucer, it was the first in a number of covert UFO research groups created inside the Air Force. For Project Sign, the Air Force assigned hundreds of its staff to the job of collecting, going over, and analyzing details from thousands of UFO sightings, all the while denying they were doing any such thing.