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.
Dr. Robertson as Chairman of the Panel. Dr. Robertson enumerated the evidence available and requested consideration of specific reports and letters be taken by certain individuals present (Tab B). For example, case histories involving radar or radar and visual sightings were selected for Dr. Alvarez while reports of Green Fireball phenomena, nocturnal lights, and suggested programs of investigation were routed to Dr. Page. Following these remarks, the motion pictures of the sightings at Tremonton, Utah (2 July 1952) and Great Falls, Montana (15 August 1950) were shown. The meeting adjourned at 1200. ## WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON The second meeting of the Panel opened at 1400. Lt. R. S. Neasham, USN, and Mr. Harry Woo of the USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory, Anacostia, presented the results of their analyses of the films mentioned above. This analysis evoked considerable discussion as elaborated upon below. Besides Panel members and CIA personnel, Capt. E. J. Ruppelt, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Mr. Dewey J. Fournet, Capt. Harry B. Smith (2-a-2), and Dr. Stephan Possony were present. Following the Photo Interpretation Lab presentation, Mr. E. J. Ruppelt spoke for about 40 minutes on ATIC methods of handling and evaluating reports of sightings and their efforts to improve the quality of reports. The meeting was adjourned at 1715. 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.