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.
“Charles Fort”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## THURSDAY MORNING The third and fourth meetings of the Panel were held Thursday, 15 January, commencing at 0900 with a two-hour break for luncheon. Besides Panel members and CIA personnel, Mr. Ruppelt and Dr. Hynek were present for both sessions. In the morning, Mr. Ruppelt continued his briefing on ATIC collection and analysis procedures. The Project STORK support at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, was described by Dr. Hynek. A number of case histories were discussed in detail and a motion picture film of seagulls was shown. A two hour break for lunch was taken at 1200. ## THURSDAY AFTERNOON At 1400 hours Lt. Col. Oder gave a 40-minute briefing of Project TWINKLE, the investigatory project conducted by the Air Force Meteorological Research Center at Cambridge, Mass. In this briefing he pointed out the many problems of setting up and manning 24-hour instrumentation watches of patrol cameras searching for sightings of U.F.O.'s. At 1615 Brig. Gen. William M. Garland joined the meeting with AD/SI. General Garland expressed his support of the Panel's efforts and stated three personal opinions: a. That greater use of Air Force intelligence officers in the field (for follow-up investigation) appeared desirable, but that they required thorough briefing. 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.