By Jim Wolf
  WASHINGTON, August 5 (Reuter) - U.S. national security officials systematically
  lied to explain reports of UFOs at the height of the Cold War, a study released by
  the CIA says.

  In what amounts to the first admission of federal deception on the issue, the survey
  said most reports of unidentified flying objects in the 1950s and 1960s stemmed
  from glimpses of supersecret U.S. spy planes, the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird.

  Rather than disclose the existence of these aircraft, developed to photograph
  enemy targets from high altitudes, the military put out false stories, the survey said.

  "While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel" to claims the government was
  covering up evidence of extraterritorial craft and beings, the survey added.

  The study was written by Gerald Haines, a historian at the National Reconnaissance
  Office, the Pentagon arm that operates the satellites that replaced manned spy
  flights.

  His article, "CIA's Role in the Study of U.F.O.'s 1947-90," was published by the CIA
  in Studies of Intelligence, a once-secret journal of intelligence-related material. An
  unclassified version of the journal, released annually in recent years, is to become a
  semiannual. The latest issue is on the Internet at
  http://www.odci.gov/csi/studies/97unclas/.

  According to CIA officials who worked on the U-2 and Blackbird projects, "over half
  of all UFO reports from the late 1950's through the 1960s were accounted for by
  manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, Haines wrote.

  "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public
  in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national
  security project," he said.

  Haines said the Air Force typically explained away sightings of its spy planes as the
  effect of atmospheric phenomena, such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.

  The early U-2s had silver bodies that, glinting in the sun, "appeared as fiery objects
  to observers below," Haines wrote. The U-2 was later painted black, as was the
  Blackbird.

  Haines said the huge number of supposed UFO sightings over the United States in
  1952, especially in July, alarmed the administration of President Harry Truman.

  In response, the CIA set up a special study group that included Edward Tauss, then
  acting head of the weapons and equipment arm of the CIA's office of scientific
  intelligence.

  Tauss urged that the spy agency conceal its interest in the phenomenon from the
  media and public "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies" to accept such a
  disclosure as confirming the existence of visitors from other planets.

  Although the CIA paid a lot of attention to the question until the early 1950s, it has
  paid only "limited and peripheral attention" since then, Haines wrote.

  Both the CIA and the Air Force on Monday defended the decision to keep the U-2
  and Blackbird intelligence-gathering programs secret rather than put them at risk by
  giving a truthful explanation of the unusual observations.

  "We sometimes take extraordinary means to protect national security assets,"
  Gloria Cales, an Air Force spokeswoman, said. "We have classified programs that
  we need to protect."

  But Steven Aftergood, director of a project on government secrecy at the private
  Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said the official deception
  contributed to a loss of confidence in government.

  "It teaches us that we pay an enormous price for official deception ... in terms of the
  loss of public trust," he said. "At the time, this probably seemed like an insignificant
  white lie, but over the years it has mushroomed into a significant culture of
  paranoia."

  Haines' study was not the first to link secret military activities with supposed UFO
  sightings. In June the Air Force reported that alleged UFO wreckage found near
  Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was, in fact, wreckage of a top-secret military balloon
  used to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.

  The "aliens" that Roswell witnesses saw were probably dummies used to test
  high-altitude parachutes a decade later, the Air Force said.

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