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.
## FLYING SNJCERS During the past weeks, with the phenomenal increase in the number of Flying Saucer reports there has been a tremendous stimulation of both public and official interest in the subject. Requests for information have poured in on the Air Force, including an official query from the White House. Finally, on July 29, General Sanford held a press conference in which he stated, that analysis showed "no pattern of anything remotely consistent with any menace to the United States;" that recent Washington sightings were possibly due to "temperature inversions," others to ionized clouds, ice formations, etc.; that instrumentation would be emphasized henceforth in the Air Force study. He emphatically stated that the unexplained sightings could not have resulted from any experiments or tests conducted by the United States. At this point, CSI felt that it would be timely to make an evaluation of the Air Force study, its methodology and coverage, the relation of its conclusions to various theories which have been propounded, and to try to reach some conclusion as to the intelligence implications of the 18
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.