Documents / FOIA release
This is Volume Three of the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology Historical Series on the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), 1949 to 1968, written by Karl H. Weber in June 1972 and approved for release in 2008. It holds three annexes, on OSI publications, OSI's external assistance and contracting program, and OSI's interaction with the National Security Agency. The released text covers production planning, review boards, current intelligence periodicals and future threat forecasting. It does not discuss UFOs.
“The Advance”10 pages
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## TOP SECRET the preparation of special monograph series, attempts were made to integrate the substance of previously produced intelligence papers for the purpose of making scientific and technical forecasts. The R&D elements of the DOD were especially eager consumers of such estimates. Unfortunately, however, the forecasts were disappointingly general and, in addition, were very conservative. Special studies were undertaken in the late 1950s to find new approaches, several with the aid of contractors. One project consisted of a study of the characteristics of "breakthrough", in order to identify key questions that could be applied systematically to information on the USSR to determine whether future advances in specific fields were probable. Another project applied statistical analysis to Soviet scientific publication patterns on the assumption that increase or decrease in rates of publication might indicate Soviet intentions as to future developments. Although a good deal was learned from these endeavors, no workable method for forecasting emerged. The major underlying difficulty of all such efforts was insufficient information on the USSR, particularly with respect to the applied research and the developmental phases of weapons systems programs -- classified Soviet research. TOP SECRET
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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. 243 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.