Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency briefing from 22 August 1952 presents the Office of Scientific Intelligence review of the Air Force flying saucer investigation, with attachments dated 14 and 19 August. It traces sightings from 1947 and explains most as balloons, aircraft, astronomical bodies or atmospheric effects. About 20% remain unexplained. The briefing rules out US or Soviet weapons and space ships. Its main concerns are psychological warfare, false alerts to air defense, and civilian saucer groups.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
In the daytime, aircraft, particularly those that are unpainted, can give extremely brilliant reflections of sunlight. An interesting case under known conditions is one which occurred last year in Maryland. A group of aircraft design engineers vent into the country to witness tests of their own jet airplanes. The three test aircraft, with unpainted wings and red fuselages, passed directly overhead. All engineers agreed that if they had not known what the objects were, and since they could not observe the silver wings against the sky, they would have reported the red fuselages as flaming trails and they would have imagined objects emitting them. At nighttime the possibility for misinterpretation of aircraft increases. First, there are the dusk and dawn illuminations already mentioned. Similarly, misinterpretations have been made of running lights or reflections of aircraft in clouds. There are a number of reports of cylindrical objects with square tails or having lighted "portholes" which have been explained as distorted images of conventional aircraft profiles on clouds of ice crystals. Some time ago a palating bright yellow light was reported moving through the sky near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For months this report was relegated to the "uncomplained" file. A few weeks ago in Washington a nun -5-
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. 29 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.