Documents / Report
This is the July 1966 third edition of Dr. Leon Davidson's "Flying Saucers: An Analysis of the Air Force Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14", published by Ramsey-Wallace Corp. It reproduces early Air Force press releases, the 1953 CIA panel report, the 1966 Blue Book release and the full text of the May 1955 Special Report No. 14 with its tables and codes. Davidson also gives his view that the CIA was responsible for much saucer publicity.
“The Pentagon”7 pages
Upon completion of final identifications, all data were transferred to IBM cards, preparatory to analysis. ## ANALYSIS OF THE DATA Broadly stated, the problem at this point consisted of the judicious application of scientific methods of categorizing and analyzing the subjective data in reports of sightings of unidentified aerial objects. It was recognized that an approach to this problem could best be made by a systematic sorting and tabulation program to give frequency and percentage distributions of the important characteristics of sightings. A suggestion that an attempt be made to anticipate all questions that might be asked in the future about a sighting or a group of sightings, and to provide answers, was rejected. The systematic approach also made it possible to develop a detailed reference manual of the attributes of the sightings included in this study. Thus, at the beginning of the analysis, a detailed plan was developed for sorting, counting, and tabulating the information from the punched-card abstracts of reports of sightings. It was believed at the time, and later substantiated, that the results of the program for sorting and tabulating would serve as a guide for the more sophisticated treatment involving statistical methods. Also, it was anticipated that any patterns or trends that might be found could be subjected to concentrated study in the hope of discovering significant information relating to the characteristics of "flying saucers". Further, it was believed that these trends could serve as certain of the criteria of validity for any concepts (models) developed in the attempt to discover a class of "flying saucers". The three parts of this study (1) the sorting and tabulation program, (2) the advanced study of the results of that program, and (3) the investigation of the possibility of conceiving a model of a "flying saucer" from descriptions reported, are discussed in sections entitled "Frequency and Percentage Distributions by Characteristics", "Advanced Study of the Data", and "The 'Flying Saucer' Model". Frequency and Percentage Distributions by Characteristics The original conception of this study assumed the availability of sufficient data to describe adequately the physical appearance, maneuver characteristics, range, direction, and probable path of the object or objects observed. However, familiarity with the data, acquired during the
Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 139 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.