Documents / FOIA release
This 1953 letter from Richard D. Drain, Secretary of the CIA's Intelligence Advisory Committee, sends the Secretary of Defense a report by a panel of scientists on unidentified flying objects. The panel met 14 to 17 January 1953 and found no evidence that the phenomena posed a direct physical threat or were foreign artifacts. It warned that the reports themselves could clog communications and recommended stripping UFOs of their special status. It also recommended public education. Attachments list the panel members, the interviewees and the evidence reviewed.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
1. Pursuant to the request of the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, the undersigned Panel of Scientific Consultants has met to evaluate any possible threat to national security posed by Unidentified Flying Objects ("Flying Saucers"), and to make recommendations thereon. The Panel has received the evidence as presented by cognizant intelligence agencies, primarily the Air Technical Intelligence Center, and has reviewed a selection of the best documented incidents.
2. As a result of its considerations, the Panel concludes:
a. That the evidence presented on Unidentified Flying Objects shows no indication that these phenomena constitute
a direct physical threat to national security.
We firmly believe that there is no residuum of cases which indicates phenomena which are attributable to foreign artifacts capable of hostile acts, and that there is no evidence that the phenomena indicate a need for the revision of current scientific concepts.
## 3. The Panel further concludes:
a. That the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.
We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real 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. 7 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.