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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.
# FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
improved methods of investigation and reporting, and by scientific analysis, the number of unexplained cases has decreased rapidly towards the vanishing point.
Therefore, on the basis of this evaluation of the information, it is considered to be highly improbable that reports of unidentified aerial objects examined in this study represent observations of technological developments outside of the range of present-day scientific knowledge. It is emphasized that there has been a complete lack of any valid evidence of physical matter in any case of a reported unidentified aerial object.
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## CONCLUSIONS
It can never be absolutely proven that "flying saucers" do not exist. This would be true if the data obtained were to include complete scientific measurements of the attributes of each sighting, as well as complete and detailed descriptions of the objects sighted. It might be possible to demonstrate the existence of "flying saucers" with data of this type, IF they were to exist.
Although the reports considered in this study usually did not contain scientific measurements of the attributes of each sighting, it was possible to establish certain valid conclusions by the application of statistical methods in the treatment of the data. Scientifically evaluated and arranged, the data as a whole did not show any marked patterns or trends. The inaccuracies inherent in this type of data, in addition to the incompleteness of a large proportion of the reports, may have obscured any patterns or trends that otherwise would have been evident. This absence of indicative relationships necessitated an exhaustive study of selected facets of the data in order to draw any valid conclusions.
A critical examination of the distributions of the important characteristics of sightings, plus an intensive study of the sightings evaluated as UNKNOWN, led to the conclusion that a combination of factors, principally the reported maneuvers of the objects and the unavailability of supplemental data such as aircraft flight plans or balloon-launching records, resulted in the failure to identify as KNOWNS most of the reports of objects classified as UNKNOWNS.
An intensive study, aimed at finding a verified example of a "flying saucer" or at deriving a verified model or models of "flying saucers" (as defined on Page 1) $ ^{1} $ , led to the conclusion that neither goal could be attained using the present data.
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 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.