Report of Unusual Flying Object Sightings and Attendant Scientific Activity

This CIA Information Report shows how thin some early UFO intelligence was. Its only source was a naturalized U.S. citizen of Hungarian background who wrote regularly to two nieces in Hungary. In November 1955 one of them sent him a letter from Budapest, and he passed the relevant lines to the agency, which translated and filed them as unevaluated information.

What the letter actually says

This copy is fuller than its twin, CIA-UAP-013, because it includes the translated letter itself. Most of it is family news: Christmas shopping, the children’s school holiday, a relative’s bad back, a famous German circus touring the city. Only one paragraph turns to the sky. The niece writes that everyone had been excited for weeks by the “so-called saucers,” that these fast “heavenly” phenomena were keeping scientists busy, and that they had been estimated to fly at 12,000 kilometers per hour.

The report adds a rough sketch she enclosed showing the objects’ formation and a supposed course between Budapest and Moscow, and notes it was the first time she had mentioned such things. A photostat of the original Hungarian letter was held in the CIA library.

Why it is in the file

In the mid-1950s the CIA collected scraps like this from behind the Iron Curtain mainly to learn about Soviet aircraft and rockets; the niece’s own parenthesis calls the saucers “rockets.” Nothing in the report checks her claims, names a date for a sighting, or reaches a conclusion. It records hearsay, passed on secondhand, about what people in Budapest were talking about.