A Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia<\/p>\n
A new report by the Central Intelligence Agency has revealed that US spying planes were mistaken for UFOs in the late 1950s and 1960s.\n<\/p>\n
During Project Blue Book, the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes were mistaken for UFOs more than half the time, according to the report published by Dayton Daily News.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cThere\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s no question that a lot of the sightings that take place are in fact our own aircraft, secret military projects or whatever it happens to be,\u201d executive director of the Mutual UFO Network David MacDonald said.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cWhether or not 50 percent can be attributed to one or two aircraft, I don\u00e2\u201e\u00a2t know if I could go along with that or not just because of the diversity of what people were seeing,\u201d he added.\n<\/p>\n
The recent declassified CIA report came days after the spy agency acknowledged the existence of the mysterious Area 51, the US airbase rumored to house UFOs.\n<\/p>\n
The site in central Nevada, about 90 miles north of Las Vegas, was used for testing of the secret spy plane. It was chosen for the U-2 program after an aerial survey by CIA and Air Force staff.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cAfter World War II people became increasingly concerned,\u201d said Jeffrey Underwood, a National Museum of the US Air Force historian. \u00c5\u201cThey saw things in the air and they didn\u00e2\u201e\u00a2t know what they were.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Underwood added that other UFO sightings turned out to be surveillance balloons high in the Earth\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
The U-2, which is capable of flying above 70,000 feet and was often spotted high above airliners in the 1950s, was one of those strange craft. The SR-71 Blackbird flew above 80,000 feet, according to the report.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cHigh altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect – a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs),\u201d the report said.\n<\/p>\n
The mistake was made because all commercial planes flew at 10,000 to 20,000 feet, and it was not believed an aircraft could fly as high as the U-2 and SR-71 did.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cAir Force investigators then attempted to explain such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena,\u201d the CIA document said.\n<\/p>\n
AGB\/<\/p>\n<\/div>\n