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.
Dr. E. F. Robertson Cosmos Club 2121 Massachusetts Ave., N. W. Washington, D. C. ## Dear H. P.: Here is that article you mentioned from the New Yorker, which I found most interesting and informative: I have listed below a few items which seemed to me to need further discussion: ## Petrol Carerus Fred Whipple at Harvard has had considerable experience in developing and using small equatorially mounted cameras. These are exposed for several hours through a rotating sector, and show a meteor trail as a series of clouds in a background of stars, thus providing the meteor's angular velocities. In many cases two such cameras are used, separated by several miles, so that the space track of the meteor can be derived. As I recall, meteor patrol cameras have been used in the vicinity of Boston and southern New Mexico only. All the photographs are preserved, and I am sure there have been no unidentified objects of any type to date. A possible modification of this technique which would provide more complete coverage is to use the Greenstein-Heneys wide-angle camera, which photographs 160° of the sky at once. Such a camera is in use at the Yorkes Observatory and is reported most recently in a paper by Sharpless and Osterbrook in the Astrophysical Journal, 1951. The major difficulty of operation would be changing the film, which might be made automatic. Another use of cameras could be on selected ground radar scopes. Possibly such a camera should be kept in stand-by status and triggered by the operator when unidentified objects are on the screen. The issue of light, hand-held cameras to aircraft pilots is another fair possibility noted in the New Yorker article. ## Study of Communications Systems One of our CRC projects is undertaking such a study, and has collected a large amount of literature. The British Army Operational Research Group has made several studies of air raid reporting systems as used in exercises, which show the distortion and "noise" introduced in any reporting system. There is a possibility of obtaining comparable
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.