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.
of the sky is now and has been for many years under surveillance every clear night in several noteworthy and curious observing programs as well as sky mapping programs at the various locations listed below. Although the attention of those astronomers is largely directed toward identified rather than unidentified objects, no case of any striking unidentified object is known to Dr. Page or Dr. Lynch. Such an object would most certainly be reported if found on patrol plates. A case was cited where an astronomer refused to interrupt his exposure in order to photograph an alleged sighting in a different part of the sky. This led Dr. Lynch to say that, if a program of watching could be an adjunct of planned astronomical programs, little cost would be involved and that the trained astronomical personnel might photograph a sighting of an unidentified object. The location of some of these programs and their directors are believed to be: a. Harvard University, Cambridge and New Mexico (meteor patrol)—Whipple. b. Yorkes Observatory, University of Chicago and Tert Duvio, Texas (several programs)—Kinol (nucleus), Kulper (asteroids), Mergia (wide angle camera). c. University of Alaska, Fairbanks (aurorae) - Alvoy 5. Detection Observatory, Ottawa (notezone)—Kilimanjaro 0. Palmer Observatory, California (sky map) - Kirkusk1 f. Id. in Coronatory, California (city nap)—Scribo
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.