Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency office memorandum, dated 9 February 1953 from the Chief of the Contact Division to the Assistant for Operations, OSI, reports remarks by Dr. Walter Riedel, a former Peenemuende rocket designer, on the California Committee for Saucer Investigation. The group had received about 1570 sighting letters and judged perhaps 25 reliable, forwarding most to Wright Field. It also planned a test hoax over Los Angeles, and the memo suggests the Malibu sightings reported on 30 January 1953 could have been that hoax.
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FROM : Chief, Contact Division, CO SUBJECT: California Committee for Saucer Investigation 1. Recently, a member of the Los Angeles Office had occasion to hear Dr. Walter Kiedel tell something of the activities of the California Committee for Saucer Investigation (CSI). His comments, as follows, may be of interest: 2. Dr. Riedel indicated he was formerly Chief Designer at the German Experimental Rocket Center at Peenemuende. He has been in the US as a "paperclip" scientist for some years. He is now a Project Engineer in the Aerophysics Department (Guided Missiles) of the North American Aviation Corp. He gave every impression of being a competent scientist, especially knowledgeable on rocket matters. He seemed a balanced person, not given to fixations. 3. CSI has been in operation some years, composed of private individuals intrigued and scientifically interested in finding an explanation for "saucer" phenomena. To date, they have received some 1570 letters relating to reported sightings. Of this number, they have been able to immediately or quickly eliminate 75% as not worth follow-up. The great proportion of this 25% have been discarded upon further investigation. What was somewhat surprising to the writer was the exhaustiveness with which these investigations are being made. Not only are very careful calculations made, if the data exists, to check the possibility of the report being physically possible (e.g., in terms of lines of sight), but the individual reporting the sighting is investigated privately at his place of residence to establish a general background of reliability and credibility. Of the 25% investigated, perhaps 25 or so sightings have been established as "reliable" in the sense that no known existing explanation exists for them. Apparently, most of these have been forwarded to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, although there appears to be a time lag of some duration while CSI is making its own check and calculations. Dr. Kiedel's description of one reported sighting by a TWA pilot and crew, and the follow-up with respect to it, was impressive to the writer in the thought applied, the pains taken, and the very careful application of scientific method. 4. So serious is CSI with respect to its investigation that Dr. Riedel indicated that they are going to execute a planned "hoax" over the Los Angeles area, in order to test the reaction and reliability of the public in general to unusual aerial phenomena. (The sightings reported over Malibu in the Los Angeles papers of 30 Jan. 53 could possibly be this hoax.) From this experiment, they hope to ascertain how many people report an aerial visual phenomenon which has been conducted so as to be clearly visible to a large number of people in the area. They will also, of course, be able to test the variation of report details, etc. This experiment is designed to give a better background against which future sightings can be evaluated. 10C29
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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. 3 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.