In January of 1947, Dr. Riedel became a Paperclip. His past work in chemical rockets and bacteria bombs was whitewashed in the name of science. The caveat for Riedel’s prosperous new life, as opposed to his possible prosecution at Nuremberg, was that he would comply with what the U.S. military asked of him. But Riedel’s rogue UFO-promoting behavior only a few years later illustrates that in certain situations, the Paperclips had the upper hand. Here was Riedel at the saucer convention, stirring up UFO hysteria. He participated in the Life magazine article and was quoted saying that he was “completely convinced that [UFOs] have an out-of-world basis.” If that did not engender what CIA director Bedell Smith called hysterical thinking, what would? Riedel was not just any old rocket scientist going on the record with America’s most popular magazine. When asked about his profession, he told Life magazine that he was “engaged in secret work for the U.S.”
What is publicly known about Dr. Riedel’s American career is that he had begun at Fort Bliss, in Texas, as part of the V-2 rocket team, but after only a few years he was mysteriously traded by the government to work as an engineer for North American Aviation. There were rumors of “problems” with other Paperclip scientists at White Sands Missile Range. Once Riedel was in the private sector, he had a considerably longer leash, given that the government was not signing his paycheck anymore. Clearly he was valuable to North American Aviation: the company made him director of rocket-engine research. But from the moment he left government service, Riedel was a serious thorn in the CIA’s side. A year after the UFO conference, the CIA was still keeping close tabs on Dr. Riedel. In early 1953, the Agency trailed Riedel to one of his lectures in Los Angeles. There, they were shocked to learn that the Paperclip scientist and his UFO-minded colleagues were “going to execute a planned ‘hoax’ over the Los Angeles area in order to test the reaction and reliability of the public in general to unusual aerial phenomena.” Mention of a planned hoax went up the chain of command at the CIA and set off alarms in its upper echelons. In a secret memo dated February 9, 1953, declassified in 1993, the CIA’s director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence expressed outrage over the company Riedel now kept. But because he was no longer a Paperclip, there was little the CIA could do except follow his moves and those of the men he associated with.
The CIA had also been trailing a colleague of Riedel named George P. Sutton, a fellow North American Aviation rocket scientist and ufologist. When Sutton gave a lecture entitled “Rockets Behind the Iron Curtain,” the CIA was shocked to learn that the flying saucer group seemed to know more about UFO sightings inside the Soviet Union than the entire team of CIA agents who had been tasked with monitoring that same information.
Ever since Bedell Smith had taken office in 1950, he’d expressed frustration over how little information the CIA was able to get on UFO reports inside Russia. Joseph Stalin, it appeared, kept all information about UFOs out of the press. Between 1947 and 1952, CIA analysts monitoring the Soviet press found only one single mention of UFOs, in an editorial column that briefly referred to UFOs in the United States. So how did Riedel’s group know more about Soviet UFO reports than the CIA knew?
Sufficiently concerned, the CIA instructed Riedel’s Paperclip handlers to get him in line. His handler “suggested politely and perhaps indirectly to Dr. Riedel that he disassociate himself from official membership on CSI.” But the obstinate scientist refused to cease and desist. What the consequences were for Riedel remains unclear. Whether or not Riedel and his fellow ufologist pulled off their hoax and how he and his colleagues were able to so freely gather information about Soviet UFOs and Soviet rockets behind the Iron Curtain is secreted away in Riedel’s Project Paperclip file, most of which remains classified, even after more than fifty years.
By 1957, according to the CIA monograph “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs,” the U-2s accounted for more than half of all UFO sightings reported in the continental United States. Odarenko had been unsuccessful in his bid to be “relieved” of his UFO responsibilities and instead got to work creating CIA policy regarding UFOs. He sent a secret memo to the director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence outlining how he believed the Agency should handle reports of UFOs:
Keep current files on UFOs: “maintain current knowledge of sightings of unidentified flying objects.”
Deny that the CIA kept current files about UFOs by stating that “the project [was] inactive.”
Divide the explainable UFOs, meaning the U-2 flights, from the inexplicable UFOs: “segregate references to recognizable and explainable phenomena from those which come under the definition of ‘unidentified flying objects.’”