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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.
“Cooper”4 pages
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# FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY of certain apparent similarities between cases of objects definitely identified and those not identified. Statistical methods of testing when applied indicated a low probability that these apparent similarities were significant. An attempt to determine the probability that any of the UNKNOWNS represented observations of technological developments not known to this country necessitated a thorough re-examination and reevaluation of the cases of objects not originally identified; this led to the conclusion that this probability was very small. The special study which resulted in this report (Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Aerial Objects, 5 May 1955) started in 1953. To provide the study group with a complete set of files, the information cut-off date was established as of the end of 1952. It will accordingly be noted that the statistics contained in all charts and tables in this report are terminated with the year 1952. In these charts, 3201 cases have been used. As the study progressed, a constant program was maintained for the purpose of making comparisons between the current cases received after 1 January 1953, and those being used for the report. This was done in order that any change or significant trend which might arise from current developments could be incorporated in the summary of this report. The 1953 and 1954 cases show a general and expected trend of increasing percentaged in the finally identified categories. They also show decreasing percentages in categories where there was insufficient information and those where the phenomena could not be explained. This trend had been anticipated in the light of improved reporting and investigating procedures. Official reports on hand at the end of 1954 totaled 4834. Of these, 425 were produced in 1953 and 429 in 1954. These 1953 and 1954 individual reports (a total of 854), were evaluated on the same basis as were those received before the end of 1952. The results are as follows: Balloons -16% Aircraft -20% Astronomical -25% Other -13% Insufficient Info -17% Unknown -9%
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.