Documents / FOIA release

Case (Deleted) (Closed) and Dr. Leon Davidson

Central Intelligence Agency · 1958-01-09 · 1 pages · text by GLM-OCR

This Central Intelligence Agency memo to the Chief of the Chicago Office is dated 9 January 1958 and concerns Dr. Leon Davidson. Officers told Davidson by telephone that his question about a space message and its transmitter could not be answered, because the evaluating agency had destroyed the records. Davidson said he had heard this before and had a second article on Air Force handling of space sightings under Pentagon security review. The memo calls the answer it was told to give noncommittal, evasive and unfair to Davidson, and expects to hear more from him.

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Chief, Chicago Office

Case (Closed) and Dr. Leon Davidson

REF : WA 26643, and Telecon of 8 Jan 58

1. We have contacted Dr. Davidson by telephone advising him that we cannot resolve his problem concerning the space message and its transmitter because records on the matter have been destroyed by the evaluating agency. Davidson accepted this statement with the comment that he had been told this before, that he now had a second article for publication concerning Air Force handling of space sightings in the hands of the Pentagon security review people (which he thought was mild enough to pass them), and he hinted that he might wish to take up again at a later date the matter of this particular message.

2. We appreciate that there have been many cooks in the kitchen on this dish and that, as a result, the extraordinarily noncommittal and evasive answer we were instructed to give Davidson was perhaps the only one possible if we were to avoid crossing up previous statements of our own, and other involved agencies, to this man. But the answer was hardly fair to Davidson, and one not likely to be fully accepted by him.

4. We are sure more will be heard from Davidson.

APPROVED FOR RELEASE

DATE 24 HOURS 28

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