Documents / FOIA release

Illegible (Report by Durant of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unident Ified

Central Intelligence Agency · 1956-01-02 · 23 pages · text by GLM-OCR

This Central Intelligence Agency document, dated 1956-01-02, is the Durant report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects. Its extracted text is badly garbled. The report records the Panel's view that most reviewed sightings had reasonable explanations and that the objects showed no evidence of a direct threat to national security. It discusses the Tremonton and Great Falls films and World War II foo fighters. It also recommends an educational and training program and warns that heavy volumes of reports could clog military reporting channels.

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

However, the Panel could not accept any of the cases

given by him because they were not, unvalued reports.

Interesting explanations of the sightings were suggested in some

cases and in others the time of sighting was so short as to cause

comparison of visual impressions. It was noted by Dr. Coulson and

concern that meteorological artifacts, if they did exist, are no

choice from ordinary writers, they can in the realm of natural phenomena

subject to scientific study, just as coquite eyes were at the time

of their discovery 20 to 30 years ago. This was an attribution in

which Dr. Robertson did not concern, so he felt that such artifacts

would be of interest and great concern not only to the U.S. but

to all countries. (Nothing like a common threat to unfit people)

Dr. Coulson noted that present astronomical knowledge of the solar

system makes the existence of intelligent beings (as we know the

term) elsewhere then on the earth extremely unlikely, and the

consolation of their attention by any controllable means confined

to any one continent of the earth quite propositious.

this once was considered significant because of the excellent documentary evidence in the case of Hachchhrena motion picture films (about 1600 frames). The Panel studied these films, the case history, ANSI interpretation, and received a briefing by representatives of the BI: Photo Interpretation Laboratory on their analysis of the film. This team had consulted (at Air Force request) approximately

Cases discussed

About this file

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. 23 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.