Documents / FOIA release
This is a CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence file from December 1952 on unidentified flying objects. It includes memoranda to the Director of Central Intelligence from Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell, a letter from Thornton Page to H. P. Robertson, and F. C. Durant's note of a call with Captain Edward Ruppelt. The file says there is still no reasonable evidence that the objects are of foreign origin. It plans a small consultant panel and reviews the Tremonton film, the Presque Isle and Limestone lights, and the Florida scoutmaster case.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## 1. Notton Pictures, Trinidad, Utah This case involves the sighting and photographing (Kodachrome film) of ten bright lights moving across the sky on 2 July 1952 in rough formation. Source is a Chief Photographer's Note, UES, with 17 years photographic experience. The local time was 1110; weather conditions bright, clear, no clouds. Objects appeared to be "cilling about" while traveling in a westerly direction across the sky. Source was driving along the road when the sighting occurred. He stopped the car and photographed the event with his personal camera. Toward the end of the sighting, one object separated from the rest and reversed course across the sky. Status: ATIC Photographic Laboratory examination of the film resulted in following conclusions: a. 10 objects, all alike in movement and size. b. Decidedly improbable that they are birds or balloons. Exact nature cannot be determined, because they are visible only as small spots of light. It can be deduced, however, that they are either non-spherical in shape and similar to bright metal in reflectance or else variably self-luminous. Objects which follow similar courses show similar brightness fluctuations which could be caused by their taking similar flight attitudes. e. The comments suggest flight paths consisting of skew curves in space. d. Apparently a coordination of movement to some extent among these objects. They seem to move in formations which are probably 3-dimensional in arrangement. 1. The single object which reversed course remained reasonably uniform in brightness. It followed a nearly straight line path with reasonable uniformity of motion at an angular velocity of about 2.17/sec. (This is equivalent to the following speeds: 37 mph 6500 yards; 75 mph G 1000 yards; 373 mph 6500 yards; 75b mph G10,000 yards; etc.). g. It would probably be extremely difficult to initiate this photography for fraudulent purposes. This file is currently under examination by the U. S. Keyy Photo Interpretation Laboratory, Anacostia. Encimated completion date: 15 January 1953.
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. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.