The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974

This is a book-length internal history written by the CIA History Staff, covering two CIA spy planes, the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART, from 1954 to 1974. It is mostly about aircraft design, overflights of the Soviet Union and other targets, the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers in 1960, the shake-up that followed, and the eventual handover of these operations to the Air Force. An earlier, more heavily redacted copy was already on the CIA’s website.

Why it sits among UFO files

The connection is well known: the U-2 and its successor flew far higher than any airliner of the day, and in the years covered here those flights were secret. A silver aircraft catching the sun at extreme altitude around dusk, or the glint of a high, fast A-12, could look like nothing a ground observer or airline pilot had seen before. CIA historians have written that U-2 test and training flights accounted for many UFO reports in the program’s early years, and that the Air Force’s UFO investigators were able to check such sightings against flight logs without being free to explain them publicly.

That is why this history matters for anyone weighing older sightings over the United States: an unknown in the official files may have been a classified aircraft the public could not be told about.

Related files

The same reasoning runs through other files in this collection, including a Navy encounter near Puerto Rico that CIA offices checked against OXCART-type aircraft (the Puerto Rico memos).