Foreign Technology Division

The Air Force's official lineage for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) begins on July 1, 1961, when the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) was "activated, and organized" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base under Air Force Systems Command. It was redesignated Air Force Foreign Technology Center on October 1, 1991, Foreign Aerospace Science and Technology Center on January 1, 1992, National Air Intelligence Center on October 1, 1993, and National Air and Space Intelligence Center on February 20, 2003; it was made a field operating agency of the Air Force on September 29, 2014 and has had a presence at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland since June 8, 2007.¹

From McCook Field to the Air Technical Intelligence Center

The unit traces its heritage to the Foreign Data Section of the Army Signal Corps' Airplane Engineering Department, established at McCook Field in 1917, and to the Technical Data Laboratory that from December 1942 carried out the Army Air Forces' scientific and technical intelligence mission at Wright Field. Captured German and Japanese aircraft began arriving at Wright Field in 1943; after the war in Europe Colonel Harold E. Watson and a group of handpicked pilots gathered German aircraft and sent them to Air Materiel Command's T-2 Intelligence Department at Wright Field and Freeman Field, Indiana; "Operation Paperclip, a follow-on project, brought over 200 German scientists and technicians to Wright Field"; and by the end of 1947 Wright Field personnel had processed over 1,500 tons of captured documents.² T-2 Intelligence was established in July 1945 and became the Air Materiel Command's Intelligence Department in October 1947.²

On May 21, 1951 the Air Force established the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson "as a field activity of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence," which in the Korean War exploited captured Russian aircraft and studied a defected MiG-15; it was renamed the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center on September 21, 1959, after the Sputnik launches, and the Foreign Technology Division in July 1961 after the establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency on August 1, 1961 and the realignment of the technical intelligence function under Air Force Systems Command.² In the 1970s the division "acquired capabilities in human intelligence targeting and laser signal analysis" and consolidated its scientific and technical databases, and its personnel became known as "the experts in Soviet aircraft, missiles, space systems and related equipment performance."²

Blue Book and the contractors

Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, the Air Force's UFO reporting projects, ran at ATIC under Edward J. Ruppelt. In December 1951 Ruppelt arranged a contract with an unnamed Midwestern research organization (the Battelle Memorial Institute) to provide scientists, a questionnaire and a punch-card statistical study; its product, Special Report No. 14, was issued in May 1955 under ATIC's cover.³⁴ The memorandum on the Robertson Panel of February 16, 1953 lists among the evidence presented "Progress Reports of Project STORK (code name for Battelle Memorial Institute contract work supporting ATIC)."⁸ The Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office calls this contract "Project BEAR (Late 1951 to Late 1954)" and states that the contractor's report was released "under the cover of ATIC to maintain its anonymity."⁴ On February 15, 1954 Lieutenant General Donald L. Putt, signing as "Commander," forwarded to the ATIC commander, Colonel George L. Wertenbaker, a report on a December 16, 1953 sighting by the Lockheed chief engineer Kelly Johnson and Lockheed flight test personnel, writing that the report "was handed to me by Lockheed personnel with the explanation that Mr. Johnson was most reluctant to write the report in the first place and then refused to forward it on to you"; the Blue Book file for the case contains only that report and a record card reading "lenticular cloud" (see Lockheed Skunk Works).⁶ A CIA memorandum of October 11, 1960 describes the Battelle repository called Project White Stork as concentrating "on subjects of interest to the Air Force's Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Field," and records that the Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence was considering funding it.⁷

The Foreign Technology Division in the 1966 regulation and review

Air Force Regulation 80-17 of September 19, 1966 provides that "The Air Force Systems Command will support the program with current resources within the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, to continue the Project Blue Book effort." Base commanders were to investigate each sighting, with the exception that "FTD at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, independently or with the help of pertinent Air Force activities, may conduct any other investigation." FTD was to "Analyze and evaluate all information and evidence reported to bases on those UFOs which are not identified at the base level," to "Use other Government agencies, private industrial companies, and contractor personnel to assist in analyzing and evaluating UFO reports, as necessary," and to "prepare a final case report on each sighting reported to it," sending significant findings to Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base and from there to Air Force headquarters.⁵ The Air Force Scientific Advisory Board's ad hoc committee under Brian O'Brien, which met on February 3, 1966 and included Carl Sagan, heard briefings from "the AFSC Foreign Technology Division, which is the cognizant Air Force agency that collates information on UFO sightings and monitors investigations of individual cases"; the memorandum of September 28, 1965 by Major General E. B. LeBailly that requested the review records a determination by the Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations that FTD "should continue to exercise its presently assigned responsibilities concerning UFOs," and the committee's distribution list includes the Commander of FTD.⁹ AARO's 2024 report dates the O'Brien Committee to 1964.⁴

The Condon Committee's bibliography cites an English translation of a Russian conference on the twinkling of stars prepared by the "Translation Services Branch Foreign Technology Division, WP-AFB, Ohio."¹⁰ Hynek's 1969 correspondence with the FTD commander and his consultancy to the division from 1970 are described on the page for J. Allen Hynek.

The Ufimtsev translation

Ben Rich wrote in his 1994 memoir that in 1975, after a July Pentagon briefing on Soviet air defenses, his mathematician Denys Overholser found, in a paper by the Soviet scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev titled "Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction," a method of calculating the radar cross section of a shape, and that the paper "had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division from the original Russian language." Rich wrote that Overholser admitted the paper was "so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd's nerd would have waded through it all," and that Ufimtsev "had provided us with an 'industrial-strength' theory" for the faceted F-117 design.¹³

After Blue Book

An Air Force memorandum of October 20, 1969 signed by Brigadier General C. H. Bolender recommending Blue Book's termination stated that "reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system," as the reporter Billy Cox quoted it in 2015.¹¹ Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans Jr. announced the termination of Blue Book on December 17, 1969.⁴ Dale Graff, a civilian scientist at FTD, later managed remote viewing taskings for the Stargate Project from Wright-Patterson (see his page).

Foreign materiel exploitation and the reverse engineering allegations

Notes attributed to the physicist Eric Davis of October 16, 2002 record Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson saying that when program managers told him in June 1997 that they ran "a reverse engineering program" he first thought they meant "recovered Soviet/Chinese, etc. hardware ... like a missile or intell platform or aircraft" and "actually came to meeting expecting to find a sensitive foreign collection and reverse engineering operation," with "UFOs" used as a cover for that; the notes have him adding that the managers "said they weren't that either." Wilson told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2020 that the notes were "all fiction."¹² The Foreign Technology Division's recorded mission after 1961 was the exploitation of captured foreign aircraft and the evaluation of Soviet systems.² AARO's report states that "AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology."⁴