The National Security Agency (NSA) went to the United States Supreme Court to protect some of its documents about unidentified flying discs.1 Among the material at issue was a heavily redacted 1973 document, previously protected with one of the highest top-secret-umbra security classifications.2 Bill Chalker has speculated that the 1973 North West Cape sighting may be referred to in the 1973 heavily redacted NSA UFO document, released in a 1980 court action taken by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy.3 According to In Plain Sight, an NSA official was compelled under deposition to admit that the agency held 239 UFO-related documents in its files.4 The same source reports that one of these documents described a purported UFO sighting in 1973, though any mention of where it occurred was heavily redacted.5
According to a member of the 6947th Security Squadron quoted in Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults, orders were received within hours of the Cuban MIG-21 UFO interception incident to ship all tapes and relevant intelligence to the NSA, and to record the incident in squadron files as an aircraft loss due to equipment malfunction.6 Bobby Inman was a former director of the NSA.7 It emerged only after his death that Harvard astronomer and self-described UFO sceptic Donald Menzel had a clandestine association with the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the US Navy, holding a top-secret-ultra security clearance.8 Menzel never disclosed this relationship, even to his own university.9
Harold E. Puthoff worked for the NSA and the CIA.10 His professional background spanned decades of research at General Electric, Sperry Corporation, the NSA, Stanford University, and SRI International.11 He went on to serve almost every arm of the US government, including the Department of Defense and intelligence-community agencies such as the NSA, as a senior scientific advisor.12 While a Stanford researcher and NSA employee, Puthoff and Russell Targ were approached by the CIA and told that Russia had a remote-viewing programme.13 Remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle also provided professional intelligence and informational support to the NSA during his career.14 Luis Elizondo has said that remote viewer Pat Price, working from a couch on the west coast of the United States, described a secret NSA location in West Virginia and correctly identified labels on file folders locked in a subterranean cabinet there.15
In 2008, James Clapper hired Elizondo into the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), the Department of Defense’s principal staff office for sensitive intelligence matters, which oversees a cluster of defense agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the NSA.16 The NSA and CIA later offered to provide assets in support of Operation Plan Interloper, with weekly meetings held in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) spaces, some at the Pentagon and others at partner agencies.17 Elizondo also attended a meeting with senior US Navy officials, CIA representatives, and an NSA representative at which the GoFast and GIMBAL videos were shown.18 Christopher Mellon has said that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), CIA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), FBI, and NSA appeared to hold important UAP data that they were not sharing with each other.19
According to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Historical Record Report (HR2), one line of effort was to partner with the archives of key intelligence and national-security agencies, including the DIA, the CIA, the Department of Energy, the NSA, and the NGA.20 After discussions with the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, the NSA’s Scientific Studies Board, and comparative research against known Special National Intelligence Estimates, AARO concluded that an alleged 1961 Special National Intelligence Estimate on UFOs is not authentic.21 Neither the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence nor the NSA possessed or had any knowledge of the alleged estimate.22 The Department of Defense Inspector General’s evaluation of the department’s handling of UAP also drew on interviews with senior officials and requests for data and policy documentation from OUSDI, AARO, the military services, and their intelligence and counterintelligence components - including Air Force A2, Army G2, Army Counterintelligence, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) - as well as defense intelligence agencies such as the NSA.23 David Charles Grusch has said it is wrong that the US Congress lacked oversight insight into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) matters comparable to the Church Committee investigations of the 1970s into CIA, NSA, and FBI activities.24