Oskar Linke, Blue Book and the CIA

As many of you know, I’m writing a book which is no surprise because I’m always writing a book of some kind. Sometimes they are even about UFOs. As I was wading through the material, I came across a sighting that Dr. J. Allen Hynek had reported in his The Hynek UFO Report. The details were a little confusing and a typo or two made it even more confusing but I think I have straightened that out, which isn’t important here.

J. Allen Hynek

According to Hynek, on July 9, 1952 (or rather the date of the report) Oscar Linke and his daughter saw a UFO in what would have been East Germany. Linke said that he saw two entities and when his daughter shouted at him, those two beings reacted with surprise. They climbed back into their craft and took off.

So what’s the problem?

First, according to Hynek, the report is in the Project Blue Book files. He wrote, “One of the more interesting but isolated Air Force ‘Unidentifieds’ came to Blue Book in the form of a (then) secret CIA document:”

That document is a newspaper report from a Greek newspaper and that’s where the July 9, date came from. Others quoted Blue Book as the source following Hynek’s lead and some had the 1952 date as the correct one. I checked the Blue Book Master Index and found nothing to support a sighting on that date in Germany that involved an occupant sighting. Later I learned that the case was actually from June 17, 1950, and the man’s name was Oskar Linke. That didn’t help because I still found nothing in the Blue Book files about this report. I believe others have also attempted to find it with the same negative results.

I’m not here to argue the merits of the sighting, but Hynek’s interesting revelation. He seemed to believe the case was in Blue Book, and as the scientific consultant, especially in the early 1950s; he was privy to a great deal of UFO data collected by the Air Force. I’m not sure how he came into possession of this report because it was classified, though it might have been routinely downgraded at three year intervals until it was ultimately declassified in 1958, and besides, it was from a newspaper which sort of argues against the classification being to protect collection methods. While this clipping came from a Greek newspaper, it was apparently widely reported around Europe about the same time which is two years after the event.

No, the important point here is that the CIA was collecting UFO material and providing it to the Air Force. This was some five years before the beginning of Moon Dust (that was 1957 and the document was published in 1952… I mention all this so everyone knows that I’m not talking about the actual date of the sighting).

Anyway, I found it interesting that there were secret UFO reports being transmitted and that the CIA was gathering the data from around the world. Since this report was fed into Blue Book, according to Hynek and I don’t know how he would have learned about it otherwise, it suggests that there was another level to Blue Book which we have yet to penetrate. It suggests a real concern for UFO information at some high level of the government. And remember, we have found UFO related documents in the FBI files as well, so there was an interest in UFOs by the intelligence services.

All we have is this single little bit of data and in and of itself, the fact the CIA reported it might not be overly important. I might be reading too much into this. I just found it interesting that Hynek mentioned the case was in the Blue Book files, but it’s not, that it was classified as secret and that it came from the CIA. It suggests a higher level of interest in UFOs but doesn’t tell us much about that level of interest.