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This CIA document, released through The Black Vault, holds F. C. Durant's memorandum of 16 February 1953 on the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, which met from January 14 to 18, 1953 under Dr. H. P. Robertson. The panel found no evidence of a direct threat to national security. It rejected the Navy analysis of the Tremonton film and recommended an educational program. The file also contains an Air Force statistical study summary from 1955 that calls advanced unknown technology highly improbable.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
officer (Project Officer, BLUEBOOK for 15 months) could not be slighted. However, the Panel could not accept any of the cases sighted by him because they were raw, unevaluated reports. Terrestrial explanations of the sightings were suggested in some cases and in others the time of sighting was so short as to cause suspicion of visual impressions. It was noted by Dr. Goudsmit and others that extraterrestrial artifacts, if they did exist, are no cause for alarm; rather, they are in the realm of natural phenomena subject to scientific study, just as cosmic rays were at the time of their discovery 20 to 30 years ago. This was an attitude in which Dr. Robertson did not concur, as he felt that such artifacts would be of immediate and great concern not only to the U. S. but to all countries. (Nothing like a common threat to unite peoples!) Dr. Page noted that present astronomical knowledge of the solar system makes the existence of intelligent beings (as we know the term) elsewhere than on the earth extremely unlikely, and the concentration of their attention by any controllable means confined to any one continent of the earth quite preposterous. ## TREMONTON, UTAH, SIGHTING This case was considered significant because of the excellent documentary evidence in the form of Kodachrome motion picture films (about 1600 frames). The Panel studied these films, the case history, ATIC's interpretation, and received a briefing by representatives of the USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory on their analysis of the film. This team had expended (at Air Force request) approximately SECRET Security Information 11
Document, cited by the archive. 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. 39 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.