Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency memorandum to the Chief, Contact Division, dated 25 January 1965, confirms a 19 January 1965 meeting with Richard Harris Hall, Acting Director of NICAP. At that meeting NICAP lent UFO sighting samples and reports, which were passed to OSI to help it prepare a paper on UFOs. The memo describes how NICAP investigates sightings and records NICAP's view that the Air Force downplays UFOs. It also recounts Hall's report of three separate radar sightings at Patuxent Naval Air Station on 19 December 1964.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
4. The most recent UFO sighting of considerable interest to NICAP was the series of pick-ups of UFO's on the radar screen of the Patuxent Naval Air Station between 1500 and 1530 on 19 December 1964. This incident was reported in the press as a single sighting, a UFO approaching Patuxent at speeds up to 3800 miles per hour. The Air Force a day or so later stated in the press that the blip was caused by faulty radar equipment. Actually, according to Hall, who talked with an unidentified person close to the situation, there were three separate sightings:
(a) Two UFO's about 10 miles apart, southeast of Patuxent, approaching at a high rate of speed, disappeared from the screen;
(b) A single UFO picked up 39 miles southeast of Patuxent altitude estimated somewhere between three thousand and 25 thousand feet, approaching base at estimated speed of six thousand miles per hour. UFO lost from screen about,10 miles out;
(c) A single UFO eight miles northeast of Patuxent, approaching at high rate of speed, made $ 1 6 0^{\circ} $ turn, and dropped off the screen.
The Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) station at Salisbury, Maryland, was contacted to determine if any reported UFO's; a radio operator had received a message from a US Coast Guard ship reporting "visual objects sighted" in same locale at approximately the same time of day. Hall did give us the name of one of the radar operators at Patuxent--a Chief Pinkerton.
5. There was another UFO sighting reported in the area by the Washington Post within the last week or 10 days. Several men watching from the windows of the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue watched several UFO's on the horizon traveling at high rates of speed. They have promised to fill out NICAP's sighting questionnaire, which Hall says we are welcome to see when available.
6. informed us that she is requesting a security clearance on Mr. Hall predicated upon biographic information provided by Not linked to a story yet.
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. 2 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.