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.
“Cooper”4 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
an Advisory Panel of selected scientists was assembled. In cooperation with the Air Technical Intelligence Center, case histories of reported sightings and related material were made available for their study and consideration. Present at the initial meeting (0930 Wednesday, 14 January) were: Dr. H. P. Robertson, Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, Dr. Thornton Page, Dr. Samuel A. Goudamit, Mr. Philip G. Strong, Lt. Col. Frederick O. E. Oder (F&E Division), Mr. David B. Stevenson (W&E Division), and the writer. Panel Member, Dr. Lloyd V. Barkner, was absent until Friday afternoon. Messrs. Oder and Stevenson were present throughout the sessions to familiarize themselves with the subject, represent the substantive interest of their Divisions, and assist in administrative support of the meetings. (A list of personnel concerned with the meetings is given in Tab A). ## WEDNESDAY MORNING The AD/SI opened the meeting, reviewing CIA interest in the subject and action taken. This review included the mention of the O/SI Study Group of August 1952 (Strong, Eng, and Durant) culminating in the briefing of the DCI, the ATIC November 21 briefing, 4 December IAC consideration, visit to ATIC (Chadwell, Robertson and Durant), and O/SI concern over potential dangers to national security indirectly related to these sightings. Mr. Strong enumerated these potential dangers. Following this introduction, Dr. Chadwell turned the meeting over to 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.