Documents / FOIA release

Flying Saucers (PUBD Is Unknown)

Central Intelligence Agency · 1952-06-02 · 26 pages · text by GLM-OCR

This CIA file on flying saucers includes a memorandum from Director Walter B. Smith to the Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. Smith says unidentified flying objects may matter for psychological warfare as well as intelligence and operations. The file also holds an Office of Scientific Intelligence study, draft NSC and Secretary of Defense papers proposing a centrally run research program, a briefing on the Air Force's small ATIC section under Captain Ruppelt, and a Project Blue Book paper on weather and research balloons.

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Trend studios as well as free studios could be made. There is now no picture of how the various phonomena may have formed patterns, either as rogards aggregation or dispersal over specific periods of time.

Finally, there might be an objective study on the attributes of available data. Thus far, reports themselves (not factors present within those reports) are only classed "explainable" or "not explained". It is not known to what extent, or where, elements of consistency may extend through both the collection of "explainable" and "not explained" reports.

Also, there is no means by which to sort out valid elements from otherwise "unreliable" reports, nor is there a means by which to sort out invalid elements from otherwise accurate reports. An illustration of a consequence of this limitation would be the probable unhappy fate of a valid report on what was actually anticipated cloud, when observed on a well established balloon track. It would, in all probability, be classed "explainable" as a balloon. The relegation of this report to the "explained" category would take any valid elements present in the report out of the reach of later analysis.

In anuary, the limited control administrative support given to the projoot

by Air Force, coupled with the astronomy limited scope of the analytical work

Not linked to a story yet.

About this file

FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 26 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.