1949

Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and his supporters gain power in China.

George Adamski, grill cook in a roadside hamburger stand, wrote, in his spare time, a document which he called An Imaginary Trip to the Moon, Venus and Mars. He voluntarily listed it with the Library of Congress for copyright purposes as a work of fiction. His effort attracted the attention of a lady writer who made a deal with George to rewrite his epic; she was to furnish the skilled writing and he was to furnish the photographs of the space ships. This lady took the finished manuscript to Frank Edwards for appraisal along with a stack of crude UFO photographs. Edwards recognized it as a fraud, declined to have anything to do with it, and the woman reportedly left his office in a huff. “In its revised form it told a yarn of how George had ventured into the desert of southern California, where he met a “scout ship” from which stepped a gorgeous doll in golden coveralls. She spoke to him with a bell-like voice in a language which he did not understand, so they had to resort to telepathy, or something similar, to carry on their conversation. […] But this congenial con man sold a jillion books to those who were eager to believe that somebody from space was crossing millions of miles of the trackless void for the dubious privilege of conversing telepathically with former hamburger cooks.”

Rockefeller Foundation launches a 12-year program designed to promote research leading to “increased understanding of one culture by members of another.” Universities in U.S., Canada, Great Britain, France, Turkey, Germany, India, and Japan receive grants.

The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S.

Operation MOCKINGBIRD – The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham head the effort. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.

FBI Memo: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been requested to assist in the investigation of reported sightings of flying disks…”

“[UFOs are] considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and the Air Forces.”. A declassified 1949 FBI document from the San Antonio FBI office, to J. Edgar Hoover.

The Army began widespread spraying of 239 U.S. cities with bacteria and pathogens as part of the secret testing of biological weapons.

The CIA bill passed Congress with scarcely a whisper. The bill allowed the CIA’s budget to be secret and enabled any branch of government to transfer money covertly to the CIA “without regard to any provisions of law.”