Documents / FOIA release
This declassified CIA document, released in 2013, is F. C. Durant's memorandum of 16 February 1953 on the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects. The Office of Scientific Intelligence convened the panel from January 14 to 18, 1953, and Dr. H. P. Robertson chaired it. The memorandum gives a history of the meetings and the members' unofficial comments. The panel found no evidence of a direct threat to national security and rejected the Navy's analysis of the Tremonton film. It recommended an educational program to reduce public concern. The release also contains a later Air Force summary of a 1955 statistical study.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# SECRET Security Information
## POTENTIAL RELATED DANGERS
The Panel Members were in agreement with O/SI opinion that, although evidence of any direct threat from these sightings was wholly lacking, related dangers might well exist resulting from:
a. Misidentification of actual enemy artifacts by defense personnel.
b. Overloading of emergency reporting channels with "false" information ("noise to signal ratio" analogy-Berkner)。
c. Subjectivity of public to mass hysteria and greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.
Although not the concern of CIA, the first two of these problems may seriously affect the Air Defense intelligence system, and should be studied by experts, possibly under ADC. If U.F.O.'s become credited in a reaction to the "flying saucer" scare, or if reporting channels are saturated with false and poorly documented reports, our capability of detecting hostile activity will be reduced.
Dr. Page noted that more competent screening or filtering of reported sightings at or near the source is required, and that this can best be accomplished by an educational program.
## GEOGRAPHIC LOCATIONS OF UNEXPLAINED SIGHTINGS
The map prepared by ATIC showing geographic locations of officially reported unexplained sightings (1952 only) was examined by the Panel. This map showed clusters in certain strategic areas such as Los Alamos. This might be explained on the basis of 24-hour watchful guard and
SECRET Security Information 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. 38 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.