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.
studied these films, the case history, ATIC's interpretation, and received a briefing by representatives of the USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory on their analysis of the film. This team had expended (at Air Force request) approximately 1000 man-hours of professional and subprofessional time in the preparation of graph plots of individual frames of the film, showing apparent and relative motion of objects and variation in their light intensity. It was the opinion of the P.I.L. representatives that the objects sighted were not birds, balloons or aircraft, were "not reflections because there was no blinking while passing through $60^{\circ}$ of arc" and were, therefore, "self-luminous". Plots of motion and variation in light intensity of the objects were displayed. While the Panel Members were impressed by the evident enthusiasm, industry and extent of effort of the P.I.L. team, they would not accept the conclusions reached. Some of the reasons for this were as follows:
a. A semi-spherical object can readily produce a reflection of sunlight without "blinking" through $ 6 0^{\circ} $ of arc travel.
b. Although no date was available on the "albedo" of birds or polyethylene balloons 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.