America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is joining in on the "Best of 2014" nostalgia to reveal on Twitter that an alleged UFO sighting in the 1950s was actually them.
#1 most read on our #Bestof2014 list: Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the '50s? It was us. https://t.co/BKr81M5OUN (PDF 9.26MB)
— CIA (@CIA) December 29, 2014
The tweet links to a report, written by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach, which outlines the CIA's involvement in the development of the U-2 spy plane. The apparent UFOs spotted by civilians may have actually just been the CIA testing these planes, according to the report.
"High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect - a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)," read a section of the the report.
To a civilian, military planes look much more distant than commercial planes because they fly at a much higer altitude. Commercial planes fly between 10,000 and 20,000 feet in the air, while military planes stay between 40,000 and 60,000 feet.
This difference could be why the military planes, which looked like they were lurking at a much further distance than the planes people were used to seeing, may have got confused with a UFO.
"[UFO] reports were most prevalent in the early evening hours from pilots of airliners flying from east to west. When the sun dropped below the horizon of an airliner flying at 20,000 feet, the plane was in darkness," the authors explain in the report.
"But, if a U-2 was airborne in the vicinity of the airliner at the same time, its horizon from an altitude of 60,000 feet was considerably more distant, and, being so high in the sky, its silver wings would catch and reflect the rays of the sun and appear to the airliner pilot, 40,000 feet below, to be fiery objects."
In the 1950s when these military aircrafts were being tested, most people also didn't know that human aircrafts could even fly that high - which is another reason why the authors claim the confusion occurred.
