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.
“Project Stork”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY ## SUMMARY Reports of unidentified aerial objects (popularly termed "flying saucers" or "flying discs") have been received by the U.S. Air Force since mid-1947 from many and diverse sources. Although there was no evidence that the unexplained reports of unidentified objects constituted a threat to the security of the U.S., the Air Force determined that all reports of unidentified aerial objects should be investigated and evaluated to determine if "flying saucers" represented technological developments not known to this country. In order to discover any pertinent trend or pattern inherent in the data, and to evaluate or explain any trend or pattern found, appropriate methods of reducing these data from reports of unidentified aerial objects to a form amenable to scientific appraisal were employed. In general, the original data upon which this study was based consisted of impressions and interpretations of apparently unexplainable events, and seldom contained reliable measurements of physical attributes. This subjectivity of the data presented a major limitation to the drawing of significant conclusions, but did not invalidate the application of scientific methods of study. The reports received by the U.S. Air Force on unidentified aerial objects were reduced to IBM punch-card abstracts of the data by means of logically developed forms and standardized evaluation procedures. Evaluation of sighting reports, a crucial step in the preparation of the data for statistical treatment, consisted of an appraisal of the reports and the subsequent categorization of the object or objects described in each report. A detailed description of this phase of the study stresses the careful attempt to maintain complete objectivity and consistency. Analysis of the refined and evaluated data derived from the original reports of sightings consisted of (1) a systematic attempt to fetret out any distinguishing characteristics inherent in the data of any of their segments, (2) a concentrated study of any trend or pattern found, and (3) an attempt to determine the probability that any of the UNKNOWNS represent observations of technological developments not known to this country. The first step in the analysis of the data revealed the existence FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
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.