For CIA analysts and Air Force personnel working together on the UFO problem, one concern was made clear: the public was not to learn about the government’s obsession with UFOs. These orders came from the top. Why exactly this was the case, the rank and file did not have a need-to-know. Underlings simply followed orders, which was why two Air Force officials from Project Blue Book, Colonel Kirkland and Lieutenant E. J. Ruppelt, were sent to sit on a panel at a UFO convention in California, side by side with men who were convinced UFOs were from outer space. These men, some of the nation’s leading ufologists, were part of a group called the Civilian Saucer Investigations Organization of Los Angeles.
On April 2, 1952, just one week before the Life magazine UFO story hit the newsstands, Kirkland and Ruppelt sat in a conference hall at the Mayfair Hotel with the leading UFO hunters of the day. It was a huge media event, with people from Time, Life, the Los Angeles Mirror, and Columbia Pictures in attendance. The Air Force officials placated the ufologists by saying that they too were concerned about UFOs and offering to “bring them into the loop.” In return, the Air Force said, they would “throw” Civilian Saucer Investigations certain “cases that might be of interest” to the organization for their review. When the scientists pressed for security clearances so they could access top secret data, the Air Force began to squirm. “I see no reason at all why we can’t work together,” Colonel Kirkland said, deflecting the question. “I think it would be very foolish if we didn’t.” Ruppelt offered up an Air Force perk: CSI members could call the military collect.
On April 7, 1952, Life magazine published its cover story titled “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.” The sixteen-page feature article began with the exclusive Air Force reveal. Above the byline, it read “The Air Force is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation; here LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” The article made its case well, with the takeaway being that UFOs really could be from out of this world. But there was a second reason the Air Force participated in the UFO convention. The CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board had urged the National Security Council to “monitor private UFO groups [such] as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles,” and because of this, the Air Force officers had been placed at the UFO convention in Los Angeles through backdoor recommendations at the CIA.
The CIA was particularly interested in one specific individual on the Civilian Saucer Investigations panel, and that was a German Paperclip scientist named Dr. Walther Riedel. Seated front and center at the UFO conference at the Mayfair Hotel, Dr. Riedel was a study in contradiction. When Riedel smiled, a close look revealed that he had fake front teeth—his own had been knocked out in 1945 at the Stettin Gestapo prison in Germany. Riedel had been a prisoner there for several weeks with fellow Peenemünde rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, and during the war, Riedel had served as the chief of Hitler’s V-2 missile-design office. The American soldiers guarding Riedel at the Stettin Gestapo prison roughed him up after Army intelligence agents passed along information stating that in addition to designing the V-2, Dr. Riedel had been working on Hitler’s bacteria bomb. It was in the harsh interrogation that followed that Riedel lost his front teeth.
At the end of the war, Riedel, like Wernher Von Braun, desperately wanted to be hired by the U.S. military so he could work on rocket programs in the United States. Germany no longer had a military, let alone a rocket research program, which meant Riedel was out of a job. The Russians were known to hate the Germans; they treated their pillaged scientists like slave laborers. An offer from the Americans was the best game in town, even if their soldiers had broken your teeth first.