Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency office memorandum, dated 9 February 1953 and sent from the Chief of the Contact Division, reports remarks by Dr. Walter Riedel on the California Committee for Saucer Investigation. Riedel was a former German rocket designer now working at North American Aviation. The memo says the private group had received about 1,570 sighting letters and judged roughly 25 of them reliable and unexplained. It adds that the group planned a test hoax over Los Angeles to measure how the public reports aerial phenomena.
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# Office Memorandum • UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO : Assistant for Operations, Oil AFT : Mr. Haydon Channing Release FROM : Chief, Contact Division, CO DATE: 9 february 1953 SUBJECT: California Committee for Saucer Investigation 1. Recently, a member of the Los Angeles Office had occasion to hear Dr. Walter Riedel tell something of the activities of the California Committee for Saucer Investigation (C3I). His comments, as follows, may be of interest: 2. Dr. Riodel indicated he was formerly Chief Designer at the German Experimental Rocket Center at Pennecuende. He has been in the UJ as a "paperclip" scientist for some years. He is now a Project engineer in the Aerophysical Department (Guided Missiles) of the North American Aviation Corp. He gave every impression of being a competent scientist, especially knowledgeable on rocket matters. He seemed a balanced person, not given to fixations. 3. OSI has been in operation some years, composed of private individuals intrigued and scientifically interested in finding an explanation for "saucer" phenosoma. To date, they have received some 1570 letters relating to reported sightings. Of this number, they have been able to immediately or quickly eliminate 75% as not worth follow-up. The great proportion of this 25% have been discarded upon further investigation. What was somewhat surprising to the writer was the exhaustiveness with which these investigations are being made. Not only are very careful calculations made, if the data exists, to check the possibility of the report being physically possible (e.g., in terms of lines of sight), but the individual reporting the sighting is investigated privately at his place of residence to establish a general background of reliability and credibility. Of the 15% investigated, perhaps 25 or so sightings have been established as "reliable" in the sense that no known existing explanation exists for them. Apparently, most of these have been forwarded to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, although there appears to be a time lag of some duration while OSI is making its own chock and calculations. Mr. Kiedel's description of one reported sighting by a TWA pilot and crew, and the follow-up with respect to it, was impressive to the writer in the thought applied, the pain taken, and the very careful application of scientific method. 4. So serious is CdI with respect to its investigation that Dr. Niedel indicated that they are going to execute a planned "hoax" over the Los Angeles area, in order to test the reaction and reliability of the public in general to unusual aerial phenomena. (The sightings reported over Malibu in the Los Angeles paper. df. Jan. 53 could possibly be this hoax.) From this experiment, they hope to ascertain how many people report an aerial visual phenomenon which has been conducted so as to be clearly visible to all large number of people in the area. They will also, of course, be able to test the variation of report details, etc. This experiment is designed to give a better background against which future sightings can be evaluated. 10C29
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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. 2 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.