On May 10, 1966, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, hosted a CBS news special report called UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? To an audience of millions of Americans, Cronkite announced that the CIA was part of a government cover-up regarding UFOs. The CIA had been actively analyzing UFO data despite repeatedly denying to Congress that it was doing so, Cronkite said. He was absolutely correct. The Agency had been tracking UFO sightings around the world since the 1950s and actively lying about its interest in them. The CIA could not reveal the classified details of the U-2 program—the existence of which had been outed by the Gary Powers shoot-down but the greater extent of which would remain classified until 1998—nor could it reveal anything related to the Oxcart program and those sightings. That remained top secret until 2007. In Cronkite’s exposé, the CIA looked like liars.
It got worse for the Agency. The Cronkite program also reopened a twelve-year-old can of UFO worms known as the Robertson Panel report of 1953. Dr. Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports program and disclosed that the UFO inquiry bearing his name had in fact been sponsored by the CIA beginning in 1952, despite repeated denials by officials. The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on UFOs in July of 1966, which resulted in the Air Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA. “The Air Force… approached the Agency for declassification,” testified secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown. Brown stated that while there was no evidence that “strangers from outer space” had been visiting Earth, it was time for the CIA to come clean on its secret studies regarding UFOs.
According to CIA historian Gerald Haines, “The Agency again refused to budge. Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence], wrote the Air Force that ‘we are most anxious that further publicity not be given to the information that the panel was sponsored by the CIA.’” Weber’s words, said Haines, were “shortsighted and ill considered” because the Air Force in turn gave that information to a journalist named John Lear, the science editor of the Saturday Review. Lear’s September 1966 article “The Disputed CIA Document on UFO’s” put yet another spotlight on the CIA’s ongoing cover-up of UFOs. Lear, unsympathetic to the idea of extraterrestrials, demanded the release of the report. The CIA held firm that its information was classified, and the full, unsanitized facts regarding the Agency’s role in unidentified flying objects remains classified as of 2011.
The public was outraged by the layers of obfuscation. The year 1966 was the height of the Vietnam War, and the federal government’s ability to tell the truth was under fire. Pressure on Congress to make more information known did not let up. And so once again, as it had been in the late 1940s, the Air Force was officially “put in charge” of investigating individual UFO claims. The point of having the Air Force in charge, said Congress, was to oversee the untrustworthy CIA. One of the great ironies at work in this was that only a handful of Air Force generals were cleared for knowledge about Oxcart flights blazing in and out of Area 51, which meant that to most Air Force investigators, Oxcart sightings were in fact unidentified flying objects. Further feeding public discord, several key Air Force officials who had previously been involved in investigating UFOs now believed the Air Force was also engaged in covering up UFOs. Several of these men left government service to write books about UFOs and help the public persuade Congress to do more.