The truth is out there, as Fox Mulder said on "The X-Files" — and the CIA invites you to read a little piece of it. But just enough to leave Mulder intrigued and his perennially skeptical partner Dana Sculley exasperated.
Likely to celebrate the long-awaited new season of the show, the CIA highlighted a few items from its recently declassified collection of UFO-related documents that it thought "both skeptics and believers will find interesting." The docs for believers range from translations of foreign UFO-related articles to memos admitting there were a few the CIA couldn't explain.
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On the skeptical side, however, panels of experts shake their heads at the amateurish quality of investigations and suggest a nationwide debunking campaign to clear the air. "Psychologists familiar with mass psychology should advise on the nature and extent of the program," read one memo — something Mulder would find suspicious.
Overall, the documents, which date from the 1940s to the 1990s, show a fairly earnest effort to explain UFOs, which if they existed would be of as much interest to the CIA as to anyone else.
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"It was interesting to note that none of the members of the Panel were loath to accept that this earth might be visited by any extraterrestrial intelligent beings of some sort, some day," read the summary of one UFO advisory panel. "What they did not find was any evidence that related the objects sighted to space travelers."
