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.
d. Objects in the Great Falls case were believed to have probably been aircraft, and the bright lights such reflections, 6. There was no valid reason for the attempt to relate the objects in the Trenonton sighting to those in the Great Falls sighting. This may have been due to misunderstanding in their directive. The objects in the Great Falls sighting are strongly suspected of being reflections of aircraft known to have been in the area, f. The intensity change in the Tremonton lights was too great for acceptance of the P.I.L. hypothesis that the apparent motion and changing intensity of the lights indicated extremely high speed in small orbital paths. 8. Apparent lack of guidance of investigators by these familiar with U.F.O. reports and explanations. h. Analysis of light intensity of objects made from duplicate rather than original film. The original film was noted to have a much lighter background (affecting relative brightness of object) and the objects appeared much less bright. 1. Method of obtaining data of light intensity appeared faulty because of unavailability of equipment and questionable assumptions in making averages of readings. 5. No data had been obtained on the sensitivity of Kodachrome film to light of various intensities using the same camera type at the same lens openings. Copied From Nearly Illegible Original
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.