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.
moving light below him — also seen from the field — and for twenty minutes put on a dog-fight with it, finally, being outdistanced at 17,000 feet. The third incident occurred in April 1949 at White Sands. Proving Ground then a Navy Commander, tracking a missile flight by theodalite, watched two discs naneuvering at high speed around the test rocket. Three such sightings were made at White Sands within a month. Meanwhile in 1948, Air Force initiated Project Saucer to study the phenomena, issued a preliminary report in April 1949 and in December 1949 released sections of its secret report to the press. The conclusion was that the sightings stemmed from three causes: 1. Mass hysteria 2. Hallucination and hoax 3. Misinterpretation of known objects This satisfied much of the public but not certain sensational writers. The resulting highly speculative books and magazine articles combined with continued reports of sightings built up such a resurgence of public interest that Air Force, early in 1951, reopened its study, instituted a world-wide reporting system, and alerted its bases to intercept the
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.