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.
officer (Project Officer, BLUECOOK for 15 months) could not be sighted. However, the Panel could not accept any of the cases sighted by him because they were raw, unvalued reports. Terrestrial explanations of the sightings were suggested in some cases and in others the time of sighting was so short as to cause suspicion of visual impressions. It was noted by Dr. Goudamit and others that extraterrestrial artifacts, if they did exist, are no cause for alarm; rather, they cro in the realm of natural phenomena subject to scientific study, just as comel reys were at the time of their discovery 20 to 30 years ago. This was an attitude in which Dr. Robertson did not concern, as he felt that such artifacts would be of immediate and great concern not only to the U. S. but to all countries. (Nothing like a common threat to unite people!) Dr. Pege noted that present astronomical knowledge of the solar system takes the existence of intelligent beings (as we know the term) elsewhere than on the earth entirely unliking, and the concentration of their attention by any controllable means confined to any one continent of the earth quite propostive. THIS YOU, USEL, SIGNED This case was considered significant because of the excellent documentary evidence in the form of Koch chrome motion picture films (about 2600 frames). The Panel studied these films, the exco history, ATIC's interpretation, and received a briefing by representatives of the USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory on their analysis of the film. This term had expired (at Air Force request, approximately 11.
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.