Air Technical Intelligence Center

The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) was the United States Air Force's technical intelligence organization at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, established on 21 May 1951 as a field activity of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. It kept track of foreign aircraft and guided missiles, and it also ran the Air Force's investigation of unidentified flying object reports: in Ruppelt's words, it "also had the UFO project," which he follows from Project Sign through Project Grudge to Project Blue Book, organized there. Under Air Force Regulation 200-2 it analyzed the reports that the Air Defense Command's field investigators could not identify, and it was the body the Air Force gave the press as the place where unexplained reports would be analyzed. Edward J. Ruppelt, who worked there from 1951, uses the name for the Air Force's UFO work from 1947 on, when the organization was Air Materiel Command's intelligence department "T-2," which he calls ATIC's forerunner. ATIC became the Foreign Technology Division in 1961; its present successor is the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.

Ruppelt describes ATIC's staff as at first convinced that the objects were real, then, after the Air Force Chief of Staff turned back their 1948 estimate, adopting the view that UFO reports concerned nothing real. Richard Dolan, citing Ruppelt, reports that the complete file on the 1951 Lubbock Lights case was open only to Blue Book and to a group of scientists, outside the project, who had banded together to study UFO reports because they believed some were interplanetary spaceships. Philip Corso holds that "foreign technology" was "the absolute perfect cover" and that ATIC "was the only bureau that could determine which objects were identifiable and which weren't." The Air Force's own account is that no UFO it reported, investigated and evaluated ever gave any indication of a threat to national security.

Origins

ATIC grew out of the Air Materiel Command's T-2 department; the Air Force created it on 21 May 1951 as a field activity of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. In the Korean War it analyzed a captured MiG-15.

The UFO investigations, 1947 to 1951

Ruppelt writes that by the end of 1947 ATIC's aerodynamicists had concluded that "there was no conceivable way any aircraft could perform that would match the reported maneuvers of the UFO's," and that Sign "ended 1947 with a new problem: How do you collect interplanetary intelligence?"

Dolan reads the period from the summer of 1948, after General Hoyt Vandenberg rejected the Estimate of the Situation, as one in which the main policy was to keep Sign and Grudge in the dark.

Blue Book at ATIC, 1951 to 1961

Brigadier General W. M. Garland stated in December 1951, in words "later confirmed in writing," that "within the Air Force, ATIC was the responsible agency" for all UFO reports.

A 1952 CIA document, quoted by Michael Salla, records that the agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence found ATIC "the only group devoting appreciable effort and study" to flying saucers. The Robertson Panel of January 1953 reviewed cases ATIC selected.

After the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena charged Blue Book with a cover-up and the 1960 congressional hearings, ATIC added personnel and raised Blue Book's budget; J. Allen Hynek had begun organizing 1959 meetings to reconsider old unknowns.

Successors

In 1961 ATIC became the Foreign Technology Division, which was reassigned to Air Force Systems Command, and its intelligence estimates were afterward provided to the National Security Council. By 1968 the division had an "Aerial Phenomenon Office." Project Blue Book was terminated on 17 December 1969. The Foreign Technology Division became the National Air Intelligence Center in October 1993, a component of the Air Intelligence Agency, and was renamed the National Air and Space Intelligence Center on 15 February 2003.

Open questions

References

Source ratings:

(

[1 Wikipedia-grade]

·

[2 Questionable]

·

[3 Reporting/Analysis]

·

[4 Speculative/Hearsay]

·

[5 Ungrounded]

). (To change source ratings,

edit this page

.)

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "National Air and Space Intelligence Center", as of an unknown date, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.