Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency document, dated 3 January 1953, records the comments and suggestions of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, which met 14 to 17 January 1953. The panel reviewed case histories including Tremonton, Great Falls, Washington and Haneda and concluded that it found no evidence of a direct threat to national security or of extraterrestrial origin. It rejected the Navy's analysis of the Tremonton film and recommended an educational program of training and debunking, supported by ATIC.
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the cases cited by him because they were raw, unevaluated reports. Terrestrial explanations of the sightings were suggested in some cases, and in others the time of sighting was so short as to cause suspicion of visual impressions. It was noted by others of the Panel members that extra-terrestrial artifacts, if they did exist, are no cause for alarm; rather, they are in the realm of natural phenomena subject to scientific study, just as cosmic rays were at the time of their discovery 20 to 30 years ago. This was an attitude in which another of the Panel members did not concur, as he felt that such artifacts would be of immediate and great concern not only to the U.S. but to all countries. (Nothing like a common threat to unite peoples!) It was noted that present astronomical knowledge of the solar system makes the existence of intelligence beings (as we know the term) elsewhere than on the earth extremely unlikely, and the concentration of their attention by any controllable means confined to any one continent of the earth quite preposterous. ## Tremonton, Utah, Sighting. This case was considered significant because of the excellent documentary evidence in the form of Kodachrome motion picture films (about 1600 frames). The Panel
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. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.