Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency memorandum by F. C. Durant reports on the January 1953 meetings of the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, chaired by Dr. H. P. Robertson. It covers the history of the sessions and the panel members' comments on individual cases, radar interference, instrumentation and an educational program. The panel concluded unanimously that the sightings showed no direct threat to national security. It recommended training and public education to strip UFOs of their special status.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
officer (Project Officer, BLUECOOK for 15 months) could not be sighted. However, the Panel could not accept any of the cases sighted 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 Dr. Goudenit and others that extraterrestrial artifacts, if they did exist, are no cause for alarm rather, they are in the realm of natural phenomenon 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 Dr. Robertson did not concern, 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 concern threat to unite peoples!) Dr. Page noted that present astronomical knowledge of the solar system makes the existence of intelligent 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 propitious. TRIDENTON, U.S.A. SIGNING This case was considered significant because of the excellent documentary evidence in the form of Koch chinese motion picture films (about 2600 francs). The Panel studied these films, the exco history, ATIC's interpretation, and received a briefing by representatives of the USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory on their analysis of the film. This term had expanded (at Air Force request, approximately
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. 32 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.