The truth is out there – the CIA is offering a peek into its ‘X-files,’ shining a spotlight on a series of once-classified UFO documents. 
 
 “To help navigate the vast amount of data contained in our FOIA UFO collection, we’ve decided to highlight a few documents both skeptics and believers will find interesting,” explained the agency, in a blog post. 
 
 Related: Astronaut Scott Kelly's 'UFO' photo generates extraterrestrial buzz 
 
 The UFO documents, which date primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, are among hundreds that the CIA declassified in 1978. 
 
 Expand / Contract A UFO investigation in Socorro, N.M. (CIA) 
 
 In a nod to Fox’s new “X-Files” series, the agency highlights “five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity.” 
 
 Related: Strange 'ancient face' spotted on Mars rock 
 
 “We also pulled five documents we think his skeptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings,” it added. 
 
 The “Mulder” documents include 1952 reports of flying saucers over the then-East Germany, Spain and North Africa, as well as a survey of UFO reports from the same year. The agency also posted a 1952 report of “two fiery disks” flying over a uranium mine in the then-Belgian Congo and the minutes of a CIA branch chief’s meeting discussing UFOs. 
 
 Related: Time to clean up all that space junk, says NASA chief 
 
 The report from East Germany details “an object ‘resembling a huge frying pan’ and having a diameter of about 15 meters [49 feet].” The object landed in a forest clearing in Germany’s Soviet Zone, according to the report. 
 
 “A smoke-trailing object over Barcelona” and an unusual object “emitting a pale green light” over the Tunisian city of Sousse are described in the report from Spain and North Africa. 
 
 Related: NASA's 'flying saucer' in pictures 
 
 Photos posted on the CIA website include an unexplained sighting above Minneapolis in 1960 and another above Sheffield, U.K. two years later. It also posted an image of a UFO investigation in Socorro, N.M. 
 
 The “Mulder” documents include an office memo from 1949, a 1952 memo to the Director of Central Intelligence and a ‘Memorandum for the Record on Flying Saucers,’ also from 1952. The agency also posted a 1953 document detailing the suggestions of a scientific advisory panel on UFOs and the minutes of an Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) UFO advisory group from the same year. ||||| The CIA declassified hundreds of documents in 1978 detailing the Agency’s investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s. 
 
 To help navigate the vast amount of data contained in our FOIA UFO collection, we’ve decided to highlight a few documents both skeptics and believers will find interesting. Below you will find five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity. We also pulled five documents we think his skeptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings. 
 
 The truth is out there; click on the links to find it. 
 
 Top 5 CIA Documents Mulder Would Love To Get His Hands On: 
 
 Top 5 CIA Documents Scully Would Love To Get Her Hands On: 
 
 
 
 
 
 Do you want to believe? Then find out how to investigate a flying saucer. ||||| The real-life stories of UFOs would be enough for the fictional "X-Files" FBI agents Mulder and Scully to spend a lifetime investigating. 
 
 With a nod to the new "X-Files" reboot (which airs on Fox on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET), the Central Intelligence Agency has released a trove of once classified documents on several real-life unidentified flying objects. 
 
 Not surprisingly, many of these UFO sightings emerged in the early 1950s. The space race was on, the Cold War fears had reached a fever pitch, and science-fiction movies like "The Flying Saucer" (1950) catapulted schlocky depictions of aliens and their flying machines into the popular consciousness. In fact, by 1953, UFO mania had reached such heights that the CIA marshaled a team of scientific consultants to investigate all of the reports and review the "Unidentified Flying Object Problem," according to a 1953 memorandum by the agency. 
 
 While most of these encounters were likely weird cloud formations, lightning or even missile tests rather than little green men, they still inspire countless conspiracy theories. From the flying frying pan of West Germany to the mysterious craft hovering over uranium mines in Africa, here are some of the CIA's most mysterious X-files. [7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs] 
 
 The flying pan of West Germany 
 
 In 1952, Oscar Linke, the 48-year-old former mayor of Gleimershausen, Germany, and his 11-year-old daughter Gabriella were traveling home, when his tire blew out near the town of Hasselbach. His daughter noticed something in the distance, which he initially thought was a deer. 
 
 When Linke got closer, however, he saw two men peering at what looked like a massive frying pan, between 42 and 49 feet (13 to 15 meters) in diameter, he reported. Around the rim were two rows of holes, each about 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter, and a large, conical tower, about 10 feet (3 m) high, loomed at the top of the object. 
 
 When his daughter called back to him, she startled the two men, who immediately jumped inside the mysterious frying pan, according to the CIA report. 
 
 One of the men, according to Linke, had a round protrusion on his chest that glowed green and then red. While he was watching, the conical structure fell down to the ground, the saucer began rising in the air and its rim was encircled with flames from below. Then, it turned horizontally and took off above the trees, disappearing into the distance. 
 
 "I would have thought that both my daughter and I were dreaming if it were not for the following element involved: When the object had disappeared, I went to the place where it had been. I found a circular opening in the ground, and it was quite evident that it was freshly dug. It was exactly the same shape as the conical tower," Linke testified to a West German judge at the time. 
 
 Linke, who had recently escaped from East Germany, claimed he had never heard of flying saucers when in the Soviet Zone. He was convinced that the flying machine was a Soviet military apparatus. Other people in the area reported seeing what looked like a comet at the time. [Flying Saucers to Mind Control: 7 Declassified Military & CIA Secrets] 
 
 Uranium mine surveys? 
 
 That same year, in what was then the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), two fiery discs were spotted hovering over the uranium mines in the Elisabethville district, according to a news report from the local newspaper Die Presse. 
 
 "The disks glided in elegant curves and changed their positions many times, so that from below, they sometimes appeared as plates, ovals and simply lines," the article said. 
 
 According to the article, Cmdr. Pierre, who worked at the Elisabethville airfield, pursued the two flying discs in a fighter plane, but gave up after 15 minutes. He said he estimated the discs were flying at 932 mph (1,500 km/h). The saucer zoomed off, disappearing over Lake Tanganyika. [Supersonic! The 10 Fastest Military Planes] 
 
 According to Pierre, the discs were aluminum-colored metal, between 39 and 49 feet (12 to 15 m) in diameter, and had a central knob that seemed to stay absolutely still as the outer disc rotated at tremendous speeds. The outer circumference was "veiled in fire," according to the report. Like the one in the previous report, this saucer seemed capable of flying both vertically and horizontally, and often "shot down" to within a few hundred feet of the treetops. The pilot thought it was unlikely that the mysterious machine was manned, as the disc's erratic motion and high heat would not allow someone to stay inside. (The dubious aerodynamics of such an object were not mentioned.) 
 
 Though Pierre is noted as a reliable officer, no one else confirmed his sighting. Based on his report, however, the CIA produced a sketch of the purported saucer's dimensions and potential operating principles. 
 
 Smoke trail over Barcelona 
 
 It turned out that 1952 was a hot year for unidentified-object sightings. 
 
 Several people reported seeing lightning-fast objects streaking through the sky over North Africa and Spain. For instance, newspaper reporter Valentín García noticed a smoke trail coming from a strange, rocketlike object flying near Barcelona. After he reported on the object, his office was flooded with calls about the enigmatic object, and one of his friends even captured a photo of the smoke trail, García reported. 
 
 That same year, people in Sousse, Tunisia, reported seeing "a flying object traveling at dizzying speed from west to east emitting a pale green light." 
 
 And in Morocco, witnesses reported a flying saucer shooting silently through the sky. In comparison, the flights of nearby T-33 fighter planes seemed slow. The object traced a parabola in the sky, paused, and then streaked off toward a town in the south. 
 
 The CIA did not release documents to show exactly how all of those investigations were resolved, but other documents suggest that most seem to be hoaxes or misidentified objects. 
 
 In a 1953 report by a scientific advisory panel to investigate UFOs, agency officials noted that "the Panel members were impressed by the lack of sound data in the great majority of case histories." 
 
 For most of the cases, expert investigators uncovered reasonable explanations for the sightings, and for others, a process of induction suggested similar reports could be dismissed as well, the panel found. 
 
 Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| The CIA was responsible for more than half of all UFO sightings in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s — but those weren’t little green men flying high in the sky, they were spies. 
 
 For years, the CIA secretly flew its famous U-2 spy plane at altitudes of 60,000 feet or more above countries like the Soviet Union. Since no one believed manned flight was possible at such heights, many who spotted the planes believed they were seeing UFOs. The spy agency did nothing at the time to disabuse them of the notion. 
 
 That’s one of the most intriguing takeaways in the document that the Central Intelligence Agency said was its most-read in 2014. Titled “The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974,” the document details 20 years of the agency’s now infamous spy plane. A U-2 flown by the CIA’s Francis Gary Powers, of course, was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. 
 
 Alongside posts revealing that pigeon-camera missions are still classified; the true story behind the story that led to the hit film “Argo;” and others that made up the CIA’s best of 2014 list, the U-2 document, which detailed how large numbers of pilots mistook the secret spy planes for unidentified flying objects, topped a list providing a rare — albeit limited — view into the inner workings of an agency under fire recently for its alleged use of torture. 
 
 Over the last few days, the CIA has been tweeting out links to its top ten most-read “BestOf2014” documents. Today, it confessed that “Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ’50s? It was us.” 
 
 High-altitude testing of the U-2…led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects,” the CIA wrote in the document, which it wrote in 1998. “In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and [many] military aircraft…operated at altitudes below 40,000 feet. Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.” 
 
 Added the document, the CIA cross-referenced UFO sightings to U-2 flight logs. “This enabled the investigators to eliminate the majority of the UFO reports,” the CIA wrote, “although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause of the UFO sightings.” 
 
 Pigeon camera missions 
 
 The CIA’s full 2014 top-ten list covers a wide variety of topics, including a 90th birthday wish to former U.S. President (and former CIA director) George H.W. Bush; the fact that the spy agency created a line of china for a fake airline during the Cold War; and an innovative system for rescuing soldiers and downed airmen from hostile territory, known as Skyhook. 
 
 Amusingly, the list also admits that the CIA used to conduct surveillance by strapping special cameras to the breasts of pigeons, and that “details of pigeon missions are still classified.” 
 
 Still, the CIA allowed that its Office of Research and Development had built a camera that could be strapped to the birds’ bodies, and then, “with the camera running, the bird would fly over a target on its return home. Being a common species, the pigeon concealed its role as an intelligence-collection platform among the activities of thousands of other birds. Pigeon imagery was taken within hundreds of feet of the targets, so it was much more detailed than imagery from other…platforms.” 
 
 One can hardly read about the missions without thinking about other great moments in pigeon history — such as Google’s 2002 April Fools’ Day joke, Pigeonrank, said to be a new system for accurately ranking search results. 
 
 Day in the life of a CIA Operations Center Officer 
 
 Sadly, the CIA did not take the opportunity to be forthcoming about its inner workings to actually be all that forthcoming. The number two item on the list, a look at a typical day of a CIA Operations Center Officer, sounds promising, and offers a few juicy tidbits, but ultimately leaves one wanting more. 
 
 Still, readers probably don’t expect the agency to pull back its kimono too much, and so most likely won’t be too disappointed by what they find. And those tidbits can be fun, and even informative. 
 
 Operations Center officers provide the agency’s leaders 24/7 alerts on crucial national security issues and global crises. “While many CIA officers become subject matter experts on specific topics,” the document explains, “Ops Center officers address world-wide political, military and economic issues daily, and they use a wide range of analytic and operational knowledge to support the Agency’s mission at home and abroad.” 
 
 More tellingly, the article hints at the career path someone wanting to be an Ops Center officer might want to follow. “Bradley,” the officer profiled in the document, earned a double major in world religions and politics and government, as well as a minor in national security studies, and subsequently worked simultaneously as a police officer and dispatcher, a resort manager, as the executive direction of a national security think tank, as a newspaper columnist, and as a freelance marketing consultant. 
 
 As if that wasn’t enough, he then went to graduate school. Finally, he went to work at the CIA’s Center for Studies in Intelligence, where he interviewed 9/11 Commission and Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission participants about how they worked with the CIA. 
 
 In the end, though, there’s nothing in the agency’s top-ten list quite as intriguing as the gleam-in-the-eye acknowledgement that it was for year responsible for greater than half of the world’s UFO sightings. One can only wonder whether the camera-toting pigeons were also once-upon-a-time considered UFOs by those who happened to catch a glimpse of something no one would tell the truth about for years.
– With the revival of The X-Files already proving to be one of 2016's most popular shows, everyone's jumping on the bandwagon, including the CIA. Fox News reports the CIA recently drew attention to some of the documents related to UFOs it first declassified in 1978. A blog post by the CIA highlights "five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity" and "five documents we think his skeptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings." The "Mulder" documents include 1952 UFO sightings in East Germany—a father and daughter spotted a UFO in a field accompanied by two men in shiny suits (PDF here); Spain—a newspaper office was "flooded" with calls about a smoke-trailing UFO (PDF here); and the Belgian Congo—a fighter plane chased after two UFOs making inhumanly abrupt changes in course (PDF here). Most of the CIA's declassified UFO documents come from the 1940s and 1950s, and Live Science notes that this isn't a surprise as the imaginations of people at the time were running rampant with sci-fi movies, the space race, and the Cold War. In most of the reported cases, it adds, "expert investigators uncovered reasonable explanations for the sightings," such as missile tests or cloud formations. Scully would be proud. (Now about those weird space balls in Vietnam.)