CIA Mishandles UFO Files Again: Intelligence on Soviet UFO Reports Lost Forever

The CIA’s history of losing or mismanaging UFO-related records continues with yet another example, this time, tied to a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) filed more than five years ago. The case, submitted on January 24, 2019, was finally answered on March 7, 2024. It centers on a CIA translation of two Soviet-era newspaper articles discussing unidentified flying objects. (Note: This newest response was received by The Black Vault in 2024, but written about for the first time on July 7, 2025.)

The CIA’s release, which is archived as document DOC_0000015452, offers insight into how the Soviet media treated the UFO issue. But the document is marred by missing information, not through typical black-box redactions, but via white-out. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, since an agency usually maintains the original document despite a redacted version being released to the public. In this case, the document was first released in redacted form in 1978, but since that date, the CIA mysteriously lost the original so therefore can not complete The Black Vault’s Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request.

The loss is significant. While the majority of the article discusses two Novosti writers—V. Rubanov and V. Chernobrov—who approach the UFO issue from different ideological angles, the CIA’s commentary, analysis, or possible intelligence insights that once accompanied these translations are now unrecoverable. The original redactions obscure what may have been CIA assessments or conclusions about the Soviet Union’s stance on the phenomenon, yet their removal by white-out ensures that the material is permanently destroyed since the originals are now gone.

This release is not an isolated event. The CIA has a documented track record of losing, misplacing, or irreversibly censoring UFO-related records. For example:

In April 2019, the CIA acknowledged a heavily redacted classified document had simply vanished from the record without explanation. (Source)

In another case finalized in March 2020, another UFO document was simply missing. The CIA admitted it had no original unredacted record of the file that appears in its own CREST archive. (Source)

Yet another example occurred in December 2023, when a document about a “space message” and a request for a translation of it also disappeared. (Source)

This pattern raises serious concerns about record preservation, transparency, and the CIA’s legal obligation under Executive Order 13526 to maintain permanent records properly and to process MDRs in good faith.

In the case of the Soviet-era articles, the remaining portions highlight a stark contrast in how UFOs were covered by Soviet media. One writer dismisses the phenomenon as sensationalism and paranoia, warning that people are “being thrown into hysteria.” Another appears more sympathetic, suggesting there may be genuine mysteries worth exploring.

The CIA’s analysis which likely appears underneath the redactions now lost, might have offered valuable insight into how the U.S. interpreted these opposing narratives during the Cold War. But due to the agency’s permanent deletion or loss of that content, the historical record is now incomplete.

As these cases accumulate, they reveal a persistent and troubling trend: the systematic erosion of the public’s ability to fully understand how the intelligence community has handled the UFO question over the decades. And with each new “lost” or white-out-redacted file or black-out-redacted file, that understanding becomes harder to reconstruct.

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Document Archive

Original CIA Document

DOC_0000015452 [11 Pages, 4.61MB]

FOIA Response

 

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