Ockham’s razor is an idea attributed to a fourteenth-century English friar named William of Ockham. It asks when trying to explain a phenomenon, does the alternative story explain more evidence than the principal story, or is it just a more complicated and therefore a less useful explanation of the same evidence? In other words, according to Ockham, when man is presented with a riddle, the answer to the riddle should be simpler, not more complicated, than the riddle itself. Ockham’s razor is often applied to the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. In the case of the flying-gorilla story, the true explanation—that the gorilla was actually a pilot with a gorilla mask on—offered the simplest answer to what appeared to be an inexplicable phenomenon. The same can be said about the truth regarding the Roswell crash. But it would take decades for more to be revealed.
One of the more enigmatic figures involved in the Roswell mystery was Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first man to run the CIA. Hillenkoetter was the director of Central Intelligence from May 1, 1947, until October 7, 1950. After his retirement from the CIA, Hillenkoetter returned to a career in the navy. Curiously, after he retired from the Navy, in the late 1950s, he served on the board of governors of a group of UFO researchers called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Hillenkoetter’s placement on the board was a paradox. He was there, in part, to learn what the UFO researchers knew about unidentified flying crafts. But he also empathized with their work. While Hillenkoetter did not believe UFOs were from outer space, he knew unidentified flying objects were a serious national security concern. In his position as CIA director Hillenkoetter knew that the flying disc at Roswell had been sent by Joseph Stalin. And he knew of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s fear that what had been achieved once could happen again. Which makes it peculiar that, in February of 1960, in a rare reveal by a former cabinet-level official, Hillenkoetter testified to Congress that he was dismayed at how the Air Force was handling UFOs. To the Senate Science and Astronautics Committee he stated that “behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He also claimed that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.”
Hillenkoetter remained a ranking member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena until 1962, when he mysteriously resigned. Equally puzzling was that the man who later replaced Hillenkoetter and became the head of the board of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in 1969 was Joseph Bryan III—the CIA’s first chief of political and psychological warfare. Not much is known about Bryan’s true role with the ufologists because his work at the CIA remains classified as of 2011. If his name sounds familiar, it is because Joe Bryan was the man scheduled for a hunting trip with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell’s friend and predecessor at the CIA. But before Bryan arrived that day, on October 29, 1965, Wisner shot himself in the head.
At the CIA, during the mid-1960s, the thinking regarding UFOs began to move in a different direction. Since the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon, in June of 1947, the CIA had maintained three lines of thought on UFOs. They were (a) experimental aircraft, (b) the delusions of a paranoid person’s mind, or (c) part of a psychological warfare campaign by the Soviet Union to create panic among the people and sow seeds of governmental mistrust. But by 1966, a faction within the CIA added a fourth line of thought to its concerns: maybe UFOs were real. This new postulation came from the Agency’s monitoring of circumstances in the Soviet Union, which was also in the midst of a UFO sea change.
In the 1940s and until Stalin’s death in 1953, CIA analysts of Soviet publications had found only one known mention of UFOs, in an editorial published in a Moscow newspaper in 1951. Khrushchev appeared to have continued the policy. The analysts at CIA assigned to monitor the Soviet press during his tenure found no stories about UFOs. But curiously, in 1964, after Khrushchev’s colleagues removed him from power and installed Leonid Brezhnev in his place, articles on UFOs began to emerge. In 1966, a series of articles about UFOs were published by Novosti, Moscow’s official news agency. Two leading scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute not only were writing about UFOs but were split on their opinions about them, which was highly unusual for Soviet state-funded scientists. One of the scientists, Villen Lyustiberg, promoted the idea that UFOs were the creation of the American government and that “the U.S. publicizes them to divert people from its failures and aggressions.” A second leading scientist, Dr. Felix Zigel, had come to believe that UFOs were in fact real.