Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency memorandum, from Frederick C. Durant to the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence and dated 16 February 1953, is the report on the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, which met January 14 to 18, 1953, under Dr. H. P. Robertson. It gives a history of the meetings and the panel members' comments on cases such as Tremonton and Great Falls. The panel found no direct threat to national security and recommended an educational program to strip UFOs of their special status.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
have been so labeled. It was interesting that in at least two cases reviewed that the object sighted was categorized by Robertson and Alvarez as probably "Foe Fighters", to date unexplained but not dangerous; they were not happy thus to dismiss the sightings by calling them nonson. It was their feeling that these phenomena are not beyond the domain of present knowledge of physical science, however. It was the Panel's opinion that some of the Air Force concern over U.F.O.'s (notwithstanding Air Defence Command and duty over fast recker tracks) was probably caused by public pressure. The result today in that the Air Force has instituted a fine channel for receiving reports of nearly anything emergent in the city 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 soon 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 "nonterminal wandering lights". The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or night to potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for decompensation made itself apparent. Comments on a possible educational program are enumerated below.
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. 32 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.