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.
k. Hand "flitter" frequenion (certainble from early part of Tresonten film) varo not removed from the plot of the "single pass plot" at the end of the film. The Panel believed strongly that the data available on this sighting was sufficient for positive identification if further data is obtained by photographing polyethylene "pillars" bullets released near the site under similar weather conditions, checking bird flight and reflection characteristics with competent amphotolites and calculating apparent "G" scree eating upon objects from their apparent tracks. It was concluded that the results of such tests would probably lead to creditable explanations of value in an educational or training program. The Panel noted that the cost in technical use would required to follow up and record every one of the thousands or more reports received through channels each year (1,500 in 1952) could not be justified. It was felt that these will always be sightings, for which complete data is necessary, that can only be explained with disproportionate effort and with a long time delay, if at all. The long delay in explaining a sighting tenure to eliminate any intelligence value. The educational or training program should have as a major purpose the identification of popular learning that every sighting, no matter in poor the data, must be explained in actual attention should be directed to the requirements of many scientific that a new phenomenon, to be accepted, must be reasonably and convincingly documented. In other words, the burden of proof is on the purchaser.
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.