The Army's Counter Intelligence Corps and UFOs: The Secret History of America's First UFO Investigators

Long before the Pentagon established AARO or Congress held public hearings on UAP, a secretive branch of the U.S. Army was already investigating unidentified objects in American skies. The Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) — the Army's elite wartime spy-hunting unit — played a pivotal and largely forgotten role in the earliest days of the UFO phenomenon. From the debris fields of Roswell to the classified corridors of the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, the CIC's involvement reveals just how seriously the military took the UFO question from the very beginning.

Here's the untold story of the Army's counter-intelligence agents and their encounters with the unknown.

What Was the Counter Intelligence Corps?

The Counter Intelligence Corps traces its roots to the Corps of Intelligence Police, founded by Major Ralph Van Deman in 1917 during World War I. By World War II, the CIC had grown into one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in the U.S. military, with over 600 agents operating worldwide.

Their mission was broad and critical: detect and neutralize espionage, sabotage, and subversion directed against the U.S. Army. CIC agents conducted background investigations, ran counterespionage operations, and — most famously — provided security for the Manhattan Project, America's top-secret nuclear weapons program.

It was CIC Major William L. Uanna who, in 1946, established the criteria for the now-famous Q Clearance — the highest level of security access for nuclear weapons information — while serving as the first Chief of the Central Personnel Clearance Office at the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission.

When the flying saucer wave hit America in the summer of 1947, the CIC was uniquely positioned to respond. Their agents were already stationed at the most sensitive military installations in the country, they held the highest security clearances, and they had the training and mandate to investigate anything that might represent a threat to national security — including objects of unknown origin in American airspace.

Roswell, 1947: CIC Agents on the Ground

The CIC's most documented involvement with UFOs came on July 7, 1947, when three intelligence personnel were dispatched to investigate reports of unusual debris scattered across a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.

The team consisted of:

• Lt. Col. Sheridan W. Cavitt — Commander of the 700th Air CIC Detachment at Roswell Army Airfield
• M. Sgt. Lewis S. Rickett — A CIC agent from Cavitt's office
• Maj. Jesse A. Marcel — Army Air Force intelligence officer

Rancher William "Mac" Brazel had reported recovering strange material from his property — material he described as unlike anything he had ever seen. Marcel and Cavitt accompanied Brazel back to the ranch, with Marcel driving a jeep while Brazel and Cavitt rode on horseback. At the debris field, they collected numerous pieces of wreckage.

What happened next became the most controversial event in UFO history. On July 8, the Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release announcing the recovery of a "flying disc." Within hours, General Roger Ramey held a press conference displaying weather balloon debris, and the story was officially retracted.

Cavitt's own account is remarkably muted. He described finding "bamboo sticks and a reflective sort of material like aluminum foil" and said the debris field was small — "maybe as long as this room is wide." Most tellingly, Cavitt later stated he never filed a report to CIC headquarters: "I don't think I even made a report, which I normally would if there was anything at all unusual."

A 1994 U.S. Air Force investigation officially identified the debris as belonging to Project Mogul — a classified balloon program designed to detect Soviet nuclear detonations using high-altitude acoustic sensors. The truth, according to the Air Force, was not extraterrestrial but was genuinely secret: Mogul was so classified that the officers at Roswell may not have known what they were looking at.

Marcel, however, went to his grave insisting otherwise. In 1978, he publicly claimed the materials were "not of this Earth" — a claim that reignited the Roswell controversy and launched it into cultural legend.

The Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit: Myth or Reality?

Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in the CIC-UFO story involves the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) — an alleged Army intelligence unit whose very existence straddles the line between confirmed fact and contested legend.

The IPU first entered the public record in 1980, when UFO researcher Richard Hall filed what appears to be the first-ever FOIA request specifically targeting the unit. The Army's response came from Colonel William B. Guild of the Director of Counterintelligence, who confirmed:

"The IPU of the Science and Technology Branch, Counterintelligence Directorate, Department of the Army, was disestablished during the late 1950s and never reactivated. All records were surrendered to the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations in conjunction with operation BLUEBOOK."

This is a remarkable admission: a senior Army counterintelligence official confirmed that a unit dealing with "interplanetary phenomena" existed within the Counterintelligence Directorate, that it operated until the late 1950s, and that its records were transferred to the Air Force's UFO investigation program.

However, the story is complicated by a significant dispute. Subsequent research suggests the "IPU" may have actually stood for "Input Processing Unit" — an Army technical intelligence office — and that the "Interplanetary Phenomenon" label was a misremembering by Craig Hunter, an Army technical intelligence official who served as "institutional memory" for FOIA responses. According to this theory, Hunter supplied information based on his recollection rather than actual documents, and the legendary name stuck.

No IPU records have ever been produced. The Army and Air Force both state that no records of this unit exist — a claim that, depending on your perspective, either confirms the mundane explanation or deepens the mystery.

UFOs Over Nuclear Installations: The CIC's Backyard

The CIC's connection to UFO reports extends beyond Roswell through an uncomfortable pattern: unidentified objects repeatedly appeared over the very nuclear facilities that CIC agents were tasked with protecting.

Since 1947, reports of UFO activity near atomic weapons sites, nuclear reactors, and weapons storage areas have been a persistent feature of the phenomenon. Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Sandia National Laboratories — all sites where CIC agents maintained active security operations — experienced repeated sightings during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In June 1947, as the flying saucer wave was just beginning, the Chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division contacted the FBI, concerned that Communist sympathizers or Soviet agents might be deliberately precipitating "hysteria and fear of a Russian secret weapon" through manufactured saucer reports. This wasn't paranoid speculation — it was exactly the kind of threat that CIC agents were trained to investigate.

A 2021 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that modern UAP reports "tend to cluster around U.S. training and testing grounds," though it attributed this pattern to collection bias — more sensors and more attentive observers in those areas. Whether the same explanation accounts for the 1940s and 1950s sightings, when sensor technology was primitive but CIC agents were physically present at these facilities, remains an open question.

Project Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book: The Air Force Takes Over

The CIC's direct involvement in UFO investigations was relatively brief. By January 1948, the Air Force had established Project Sign (initially code-named Project SAUCER) at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio — effectively centralizing UFO investigation authority within the Air Force Technical Intelligence Division.

This transfer of responsibility was formalized when the CIC's alleged IPU records were surrendered to the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations in connection with Project Blue Book. From that point forward, the Army — and the CIC specifically — stepped back from the UFO question. As one historical assessment noted, "Neither the Navy nor the Army showed much interest in UFOs" after the Air Force assumed the lead.

Project Sign evolved into Project Grudge in 1949 (the name reflecting a growing institutional hostility toward the subject), and then into Project Blue Book in 1952. Over its 17-year run, Blue Book investigated approximately 12,618 UFO reports, concluding that most could be attributed to natural phenomena, conventional aircraft, or satellites. But 701 cases — roughly 5.5% — were classified as "unexplained."

Blue Book was officially closed in December 1969, following the Condon Report's recommendation that further study was unlikely to produce significant scientific results. The Air Force concluded that no UFO had ever posed a threat to national security — a conclusion that remains hotly contested to this day.

Cold War Deception: When the Military Became the UFO Source

One of the most ironic twists in the CIC-UFO story is the revelation that military intelligence itself became a source of UFO disinformation during the Cold War.

Classified flights of the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft were estimated to account for more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s. The Air Force knowingly issued "misleading and deceptive statements" to explain away sightings that were actually caused by its own secret aircraft.

In the 1980s, during development of the stealth bomber, Air Force officers stationed near Area 51 went even further: they actively spread flying saucer stories and doctored UFO photographs among local civilians to discourage investigation into the strange aircraft being tested overhead. The very UFO mythology that intelligence agencies had spent decades dismissing was weaponized as cover for classified programs.

This raises a troubling epistemological question that persists today: when the military has a documented history of both investigating and fabricating UFO stories, how do we determine what's genuine? It's a question that the CIC agents of 1947 never had to answer — but one that their institutional descendants at AARO are grappling with right now.

From CIC to AARO: The Thread That Connects 1947 to 2026

The Counter Intelligence Corps was formally dissolved in 1961, with its functions absorbed into the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps. But its legacy in the UFO story endures — and in many ways, today's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is the spiritual successor to those early CIC agents who were first asked to investigate objects they couldn't explain.

AARO has now examined over 2,000 UAP cases, with roughly 15% remaining unexplained after thorough review. President Trump's February 2026 disclosure order has directed the Pentagon to begin releasing UFO-related files — potentially including records that trace back to the CIC era.

The parallel to interstellar science is striking. Just as CIC agents in 1947 confronted objects whose origins they couldn't determine, today's astronomers are studying 3I/ATLAS — a genuine visitor from another star system, confirmed through spectroscopic analysis to carry water ice, carbon dioxide, and even prebiotic molecules from an alien stellar nursery. The difference is methodology: where the CIC operated in secrecy and classification, modern science operates in the open, with peer-reviewed findings and publicly available data.

The 77-year journey from the CIC's classified files to AARO's congressional briefings represents a fundamental shift in how we approach the unknown. The questions haven't changed — but the willingness to ask them publicly has.

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