Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency memorandum of 5 January 1967, addressed to the Director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center, reports a photo analysis of Polaroid photographs of an alleged UFO taken on the shore of Lake St. Clair, Michigan, supplied by the Air Force's Aerial Phenomena Office at Wright-Patterson AFB. Using Major R.W. Nyls's site measurements and several assumptions, it estimates approximate dimensions. It finds no definite evidence of a hoax, notes suspicious features, and calls the result inconclusive.
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6. In conclusion, it should be noted that all of the information contained in this memorandum deals with quantitative or dimensional information obtained from calculations based upon a large number of assumptions. The qualitative or subjective analysis of the imagery is not treated because of a lack of background knowledge on UFO imagery. This office cannot shed any light on the authenticity of this alleged UFO from this photo analysis. There is no definite evidence that this photography is a hoax. On the other hand, for one to assume that this object is a UFO is equally as dangerous. There are too many unanswered questions to label the probable cause of this sighting as anything but undeterminable. For example the degraded image quality of the helicopter when compared with the UFO is suspect when considered that the helicopter was closer to camera station when photographed. Likewise, the crispness of the edge gradient of the black band on the UFO is good considering the distance at which the object was photographed. Also, the fact that the tail section of the UFO was photographed in each case with the same cross section exposed casts some suspicion on the authenticity of the UFO. However, each of the above facts can be explained by various reasons and because of these reasons the photo analysis of this UFO photograph has resulted in inconclusive answers.
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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. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.