Documents / FOIA release
Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects Convened by Office of Scientific Intelligence, CIA January 14- 18, 1953
Central Intelligence Agency · 2013-06-26 · 38 pages · text by OCR
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.
“Dominion Observatory”1 page
- p. 19 …Dominion Observatory, Ottawa (meteors)—Millman
e. Palomar Observatory, California (sky map)—Minkowski
f. Lick Observatory, California…
great importance on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur.
The upper scale responsibility and the possible use of such groups
the summer purposes should be kept in mind.
INCHES AND 24 INCHES OF STAMPINGS
The occurrence of the Panel was, however, the chief object, that the number of sightings could be reasonably expected to be small this summer.
Cases discussed
- Foo Fighters of World War II 1944
Instances of "Foo Fighters" were cited, WWII balls of light near aircraft - The Mariana UFO Film 1950
motion pictures of sightings at Great Falls, Montana (15 August 1950) - The 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO Flap 1952
Washington, D. C. area (19 July 1952) discussed in detail - The Tremonton UFO Film (The Newhouse Film) 1952
Tremonton, Utah, Sighting section; Kodachrome film analysed by USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory - Haneda AFB radar-visual sighting and F-94 intercept 1952
Haneda A.F.B. Japan (5 August 1952) discussed in detail - Bellefontaine Radar-Visual and Gun-Camera Intercept 1952
Bellefontaine, Ohio (1 August 1952) among significant sightings discussed - The Robertson Panel: The CIA's Secret UFO Review 1953
Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs, January 14-18, 1953, Robertson as Chairman - Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14: the Battelle statistical study, 1955 1955
Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Aerial Objects, 5 May 1955, 3201 cases
About this file
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 38 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.