Germans. For example, they received the services of General
Reinhard Gehlen, former intelligence chief of the German Army
General Staff on the eastern front. Gehlen turned over to the
Americans his entire spy apparatus, giving a then blinded America
an eye into Soviet military objectives. Further, he set up and
modernized our intelligence apparatus, culminating in the C.I.A.,
as a means to counter the Soviet threat. This spy effort was
massive but please keep it in mind as we turn our attention to
something smaller and seemingly less significant.
As mentioned, in the 1950s the United States Air Force was busy
developing and testing flying saucers derived from captured
German technology. Of course, the Air Force wanted it to remain
a secret project, after all, we were involved in a Cold War.
Given this problem might the Americans have asked the question as
they always did: How did the Germans do this? If they did they
would have formed, as an adjunct to the secret saucer programs, a
program to gather material on all civilian sightings of strange
unidentified flying objects, under the cover of national
security, as if an external threat existed. This agency would
have then been in a position to "explain" or spin the data so as
not to alarm the populace while still maintaining secrecy
concerning its own projects.
As the reader may have surmised by now, this is exactly what the
united States Air Force did so successfully in the form of
Project Blue Book and its predecessors. The Air Force
experimented on flying saucers on one hand while gathering
reported sightings from civilians on the other hand, 7