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Who should collect space debris? A secret Cold War dispute in Washington

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The Pentagon's seventh UFO file release includes a memo from the 1960s and a collection of documents. They show how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations tried to decide who should collect and examine rocket and satellite fragments falling to Earth. According to a NASA official, the military wanted to use the civilian space agency only as a cover.

The seventh UAP file release published on October 23 by the US Department of War contains two documents that are not about sightings. One is a memo from May 1963; the other is a 72-page document collection from the national security files of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, titled "Space Vehicle Fragments – Responsibilities and Procedures." Both deal with the question of who is responsible for objects falling back from space.

The problem

By the early 1960s, more and more objects were orbiting the Earth, and some of them sooner or later fell back. In September 1962, in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, two patrolling police officers found a piece of metal weighing about 9 kilograms on the road. It turned out to be a fragment of the reentry module of the Soviet Sputnik 4 (Korabl-Sputnik 1). The object was later taken to the Smithsonian Institution and then returned to the Soviet Union.

Less than a month later, on October 2, 1962, Edward C. Welsh, executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, part of the Executive Office of the President, wrote a letter to McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, and James Webb, the head of NASA. He wrote that a decision was needed on which agency was responsible for acquiring, analyzing and identifying space vehicle fragments falling on US territory or otherwise coming into American hands.

The first meetings

The first interagency meeting was held on October 17, 1962, and the next on November 6. It was attended by representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, NASA, the National Security Council, the Office of Science and Technology and the State Department. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was not present.

Two kinds of text were prepared: a draft public announcement and a nine-point confidential directive. Its essence:

NASA is responsible for receiving and identifying space vehicle fragments falling on domestic territory or otherwise coming into its possession.
The Department of Defense is responsible for fragments from its own military launches.
Fragments from foreign launches must be handed over with priority to the Department of Defense for intelligence analysis. According to a March 1963 amendment by the Department of Defense, this applies even to complete vehicles. After analysis, the fragments go into NASA's custody until it is decided whether they are returned to the launching country or disposed of in another appropriate way.
The Smithsonian Institution takes part in collection and analysis under a contract with NASA, the AEC in examining fragments suspected of containing radioactive material, and the State Department in matters with a foreign dimension.
The Department of Defense notifies NASA if a vehicle's reentry is expected and if recovery teams have been alerted.
Public information is NASA's task, except for military launches.

The phrase "or otherwise disposed of in an appropriate manner" did not end up in the text by accident. Charles E. Johnson, a National Security Council staff member, wrote to Welsh on October 23, 1962, that it goes without saying that if a satellite is considered hostile, it will not be returned to the launching country. One of Johnson's drafts also stated that further handling of recovered objects would follow existing intelligence procedures.

The CIA applies the brakes

On November 28, 1962, Welsh asked for the CIA's opinion. Marshall S. Carter, deputy director of the CIA, replied on December 7 that the subject also concerned the intelligence community, and referred the matter to the United States Intelligence Board. On December 10, Johnson described the dispute as a "tempest in a teapot", and added that it could have been avoided if the Space Council had involved the CIA from the start.

The matter stalled for months. On May 31, 1963, Welsh wrote to CIA Director John McCone: the amended confidential directive had received top-level approval from the Department of Defense, but it had not been coordinated within the intelligence community. He wrote that considerable time had passed since then.

NASA's objections

A memo dated May 29, 1963, records the objections of Arnold Frutkin, NASA's head of international programs:

In his view, there was no need for a public announcement, and a White House statement would needlessly alarm people.
He believed the Department of Defense and the Air Force wanted to use NASA as a cover, while not really allowing it to do anything other than return certain fragments.
In his view, NASA and the CIA were cooperating well, and he wanted to wait for the Intelligence Board's decision.
He opposed bringing the issue before Congress, fearing that a debate there would harm the matter.

In a letter to Welsh, Frutkin also objected that under the amended text the Department of Defense would receive the foreign fragments and keep them until analysis. In his view, this contradicted NASA's responsibility for receiving and identifying the fragments.

Another round, before Kennedy's death

On October 24, 1963, Welsh wrote to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, McCone, Webb, Bundy and other officials. In his view, there had been ample time for the agencies involved to reach an agreement. He called a new meeting for November 6, which the CIA also attended. This was followed by a meeting scheduled for November 21, one day before President Kennedy's assassination. The documents do not show whether the directive was ultimately approved.

Sand ballast and one in 50,000

The practical side was represented by the Saturn I rockets. According to a December 16, 1963, memo by NASA staff member James R. Morrison, the SA-5 launch was highlighted at a State Department briefing because a large mass would go into orbit and then come back. NASA took two precautions:

instead of the planned lead and iron ballast, it put about 5,900 kilograms of sand into the rocket;
it roughened the Jupiter nose cone so that it would burn up on reentry.

According to the first estimate, there was a 95 percent chance that at least about 1,270 kilograms of material would reach the surface, probably in 30–39 pieces: six engines, three titanium spheres and about 30 electronic units. The pieces could fall within a strip 3,500–4,000 kilometers long and 160 kilometers wide. The chance of a person being injured or killed was estimated at one in 50,000 per launch. According to the revised December figures, there was a 95 percent chance that about 1,070 kilograms, and a 50 percent chance that about 1,360 kilograms, could reach the ground.

Blowing up the stage in orbit was rejected because it would only have created more dangerous fragments, and vaporizing it would have required a nuclear charge. For comparison, the memo also notes that according to an estimate by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, ten times as many meteorites strike Africa alone each year as the number of pieces that could come back from SA-5.

A script for reporters

A classified document dated April 8, 1964, gave NASA officials a ready-made question-and-answer script in case they were asked about falling fragments. It states that a fragment could even be lethal, depending on which part of the body it strikes. To the question of whether NASA was justified in increasing the chance of a fatal impact, the answer was: many human activities carry a demonstrable risk of accident, such as flying, driving or playing golf in a storm, yet we do not give them up.

Before the SA-6 launch, Julian Scheer, NASA's head of public affairs, instructed the directors of three NASA centers, including Wernher von Braun. Under these instructions, no impact predictions would be issued and no information would be volunteered. After an impact, the government would under no circumstances speculate about the object's origin, but would obtain it, examine it and try to determine where it came from.

Why was it included in the UFO files?

The 72-page document collection contains no UFO, unidentified object or extraterrestrial technology. It is official correspondence about rocket debris. Two things may attract the interest of UFO researchers: the secret, multi-agency system set up to collect falling objects itself, and the statement that the government does not speculate about the origin of an unknown object until it has examined it.

The sober take

The documents are authentic government records. They show that during the Cold War, falling space vehicle fragments had intelligence value and several agencies competed for control over them. The 72-page collection contains not a single reference to UFOs or objects of alien origin: the texts deal with US military and foreign-launched space vehicles. The characterization of NASA as a cover appears as a NASA official's opinion in a separate internal memo, and it concerns the division of responsibilities. The sentence about the government not speculating about an object's origin appears in press guidance written for the debris of a Saturn rocket, and reflects customary official caution. It is known that the Air Force had a program called Moon Dust to locate returning space vehicles and debris, meaning the subject was a regular military task. The documents therefore do not prove any concealed UFO wreckage. They do, however, clearly show how a secret recovery system took shape that later became the starting point for many UFO legends.