Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency document, dated 21 January 1953, records the comments and suggestions of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, which met from 14 to 17 January 1953. The panel found no evidence of a direct threat to national security and no evidence linking sightings to space travelers. It rejected the Navy's analysis of the Tremonton film and recommended an educational program of training and debunking. It also listed the evidence the panel reviewed.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
has instituted a fine channel for receiving reports of nearly anything anyone sees in the sky and fails to understand. This has been particularly encouraged in popular articles on this and other subjects, such as space travel and science fiction. The result is the mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication with material quite irrelevant to hostile objects that might some day appear. The Panel agreed generally that this mass of poor-quality reports containing little, if any, scientific data was of no value. Quite the opposite, it was possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in "nocturnal meandering lights". The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or might be potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for deemphasization made itself apparent. Comments on a possible educational program are enumerated below. It was the opinion of one of the Panel members that the "saucer" problem had been found to be different in nature from the detection and investigation of German V-1 and V-2 guided missiles prior to their operational use in World War II. In this 1943-1944 intelligence operation (CROSSBOW), there was excellent intelligence, and by June
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. 21 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.