UFOs and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot: An NSA Draft Memo
An undated NSA draft argued that analysts' inability to process UFO reports exposed a dangerous weakness against surprise attack. It cites an Air Force intercept operator who noticed Soviet Bloc radars tracking an erratic 'balloon'.
What this record is
This seven-page draft memorandum has the subject line “UFO’s and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data.” It is undated. The National Archives catalog gives 1968, the same year as the companion “UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions” draft. The pages are stamped DRAFT, the SECRET markings are struck through, and “Clean Copy” is written at the top of the first page. Each page carries the NSA document number 6577932. The first page bears a stamp approving release on 18 July 2017 under Mandatory Declassification Review case 100625.
This copy shows how the document was handled over the years. Several passages are boxed or crossed through by hand and labelled with FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3), and one section is marked (b)(5), “deliberative process privilege.” In this copy the text under those marks is still legible. These are the passages that were withheld when NSA released the memo with deletions around 1980. In its affidavit in the lawsuit Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. NSA, NSA described the document as a memorandum that “discusses the UFO phenomena as the author believes they may relate to the intelligence community.” It said the deletions covered descriptive references to NSA’s communications intelligence operations and “this employee’s expression of opinion on how the topic relates to the mission of the Agency.” The 2017 review released those passages. See the CAUS v. NSA page.
What it says
The opening paragraph states the thesis: “The implications of the UFO phenomena go far beyond the particular phenomena itself. The human incapacity to objectively process such data indicates a serious weakness in the intelligence community.” The United States cannot respond quickly to indicators of surprise attack if its analysts share the common human blind spot, which the memo describes as “the inability of most men to objectively process and evaluate highly unusual data.”
The second section draws on Jacques Vallée’s work to describe a sequence of psychological reactions to strange events. The mind first records accurately, then goes into shock, then adds imagination and interpretation to make the data acceptable. At the highest level of strangeness it may bury the memory in amnesia or reach for a religious experience. The stranger the event, the memo argues, the fewer people a witness will tell. Two hand-drawn charts illustrate these claims. They are labelled speculative and show no data.
The third section, withheld in 1980, gives an example. “Within the past few years,” a young Air Force technician doing first-level traffic analysis and intercept processing against Soviet Bloc countries saw one Bloc country report a radar track of a high, fast object with an erratic flight pattern that sometimes moved against the wind. The Bloc began reporting it as a balloon, and the next country to pick it up kept the balloon designation despite its behaviour. In the American processing facility, the airman noticed that everyone became “more edgy and silent than usual” and gave aggressive answers to his questions. The memo does not say when or where this happened, and it gives no evidence beyond the airman’s impression.
The recommendations, also withheld in 1980, call for training intelligence analysts to handle unusual phenomena and for a “special surprise alert team” of naturally capable analysts reporting to the JCS and the top of the intelligence community. They also call for training senior officers in objective analysis of surprise material, and suggest that OPSEC problem-solving teams would be the best vehicle. An appendix lists ten historical examples of “blindness to surprise material causing defeat,” from the Aztecs and Pearl Harbor to Enigma and Vietnam. One of them is openly hypothetical: Americans “destroyed by fast erratic moving oval guided missiles from Russia” because they had dismissed such objects as illusions.
Context
Like its companion draft (UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions), this is one employee’s argument, not an agency assessment. Its psychology comes from popular sources, and its single case is anecdotal. The Soviet Bloc anecdote is the only operational detail, and it proves less than it seems. An erratic radar track labelled as a balloon may simply have been a balloon, and the unease the airman sensed cannot be tested. The memo’s real subject is warning intelligence. Its UFO material serves as an example of how unexpected data gets explained away.
Status
An unofficial draft. It was released with deletions in 1980 and in full after a 2017 mandatory declassification review, and it reached the National Archives in 2025 with the rest of the NSA series.
Sources
- National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596347953
- PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/580103959/457UAP00034_released.pdf
- Series: Records from the National Security Agency Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/580103959
- Affidavit of Eugene F. Yeates, CAUS v. NSA, 30 September 1980: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596347887