7 of the most surreal UFO documents from the CIA archive

The late 1940s in the Uzbekistan capital city of Tashkent saw more unidentified light shows than it could count.

"From May to September 1947," [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], "three light phenomena happening at intervals of about 15 minutes were seen almost every night between 9 and 10 p.m. local time." At its highest point, the light seemed to be roughly a fifth the diameter of a full moon.

As the report details, the light always began as a bright red ball. Within seconds it would grow a fiery tail and then morph into a green, then white, mass.

"Smoke trails, noises, or detonations were not noticed."

A daily newspaper in Vienna, of all publications, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of "two fiery disks" hovering over uranium mines in mid-August, 1952.

As the report explains, the two objects supposedly tore through the airspace in a highly erratic fashion. At one point they would be soaring vertically away from the onlookers, and the next they'd be diving down "to within 20 meters of the tree tops."

Commander Pierre of the local airfield took off in his own fighter plane to wrangle the unknown aircraft. However, "Pierre had to give up pursuit after 15 minutes since both disks, with a loud whistling sound which he heard despite the noise of his own plane, disappeared in a straight line toward Lake Tanganyika."

Pierre later estimated the disks were traveling more than 900 miles per hour.

The CIA published this[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] reporting on one German man's fantastic account of a 45-foot-wide disk he spotted in a forest when his motorcycle broke down.

Accompanied by his 11-year-old daughter, the man approached the strange-looking object to find two men in "shiny metallic clothing" kneeling over the disk, which had a cone-shaped capsule on top.

Once the two men realized they were being watched, the man says, they hopped into the capsule and the disk began to leave the ground. Eventually, it rose high above the trees and took off.

"I had never heard of the term 'flying saucer' before I escaped from the Soviet Union into West Berlin," the man later said. "When I saw this object, I immediately thought it was a new Soviet military machine."

In early September 1952, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of various UFOs over Casablanca, Morocco. The town made famous in the 1942 film of the same name saw two flying saucers that were "elongated in shape" and "followed by a trail of white light."

On a separate occasion in July, two other people reported seeing a "blue-green, ball-shaped object" just before midnight "moving at a high rate of speed." The mysterious object disappeared after only three or four seconds, however, "as though it had literally melted into the sky."

The very next morning, another couple observed a mysterious object around 9 a.m. for roughly 30 seconds. Several more accounts, all with differing details, emerged that summer.

In mid-November 1952, three men working in a forest in Kirkenes, Norway [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] roughly 1,500 feet in the air.

"The object appeared to have a diameter of 15-20 meters (50-65 feet)," the CIA report stated. "After the workers had observed the object for a while, it suddenly flew away at great speed in a northwesternly direction."

They were the only people who reported seeing the object, unfortunately for them. "They swear, however, that their report is true."

With all these reports coming in, it didn't take long for the CIA to get suspicious. In August 1952 (keep in mind, still two months ahead of its memo on those two national security concerns), the Deputy Assistant Director of the Scientific Intelligence office [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]discounting the threat posed by UFOs.

"Of 1000 to 2000 such reports received by ATIC (Air Technical Intelligence Center), a large percentage are clearly 'phoney,'" the report reads. In fact, many of the reported flights were easily explained as known missions using US equipment, the report went on.

Owing to the agency's uncertainty, however, the Deputy AD recommended CIA surveillance continue on the mysterious "flying saucers" under the cover of darkness.

"It is strongly urged ... that no indication of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public," the report read, "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies to accept such interest as 'confirmatory' of the soundness of 'unpublished facts' in the hands of the U.S. government."