Documents / FOIA release
This CIA release, approved in 2001, contains Flying Saucers UFO Reports No. 1, a magazine that Dell Publishing issued in 1967. It argues that UFOs deserve serious study. It gathers reported landings, radar trackings, sightings by astronomers and pilots, and cases involving creatures, drawing on Ruppelt, Keyhoe, Fuller, NICAP and APRO. It also describes Project Blue Book, NICAP, APRO and the new University of Colorado study under Dr. Edward Condon.
“The Iron Skeptic”1 page
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# Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010002-9
giving off the odor of burned gasoline.
The youth broadcast his sighting to everyone in the farm home and his brother raced out in time to see the red vapor disappearing into the clouds.
Meantime, the mother of the boys had phoned the Fredonia State Police Barracks to report the strange occurrence. She was told that Trooper E. J. Haas would be right out. But before the trooper arrived, a 16-year-old girl, visiting at the farm home, ran in from outside to announce the Thing had returned. She and three of the boys raced off for a second look, this time at what they said was a yellowish object moving across the field some 700 feet away.
When Trooper Haas arrived, he accompanied the 16 year-old boy to the spot where the object first had been sighted. Here they became aware of a pungent odor and saw, on the ground, a purplish substance that smelled not unlike household oil. Some of this was scraped up and given to the State Police who were said to have turned it over to the Niagara Falls Air Force Base. This substance later was said to have been a combination of three-in-one oil plus Bio-stringent (Gentian violet). Regulations forbid the Air Force to release information on such findings, but it was reported that the base did confirm that the four teenagers "did see something." The family reported that the experience reduced the output of their cow from $ 2 \frac{1}{2} $ cans to one can of milk.
Erie, Pa., August 1, 1966: Equally certain that sighters had "seen something" were the officers who investigated a call to Beach 6 on the Peninsula of Presque Isle State Park, just outside of Erie. The initial call had come from a group of picnickers, a 22-year-old woman with two small children; an 18-year-old youth and a 16-year-old girl, all from the Jamestown, N.Y. area. Their car was stuck in the sand and they needed assistance. While they waited police arrival, they saw a star move. It got brighter, moved faster, then dimmed and came straight down, so close that the car vibrated. The object was described as being mushroomed shaped with a narrow base rising to an oval structure. There were lights on the back. It came in from the north, hovered briefly over the area, then landed. A beam of light came out from the craft and moved in a straight line along the ground, lighting up the whole woods. The object was then said to have taken off at a "tremendous rate of speed." Shortly after it disappeared, Peninsula Police Officers Ralph E. Clark and Robert Loeb, Jr., came on the scene, alerted by the report of a disabled car. The officers saw nothing in the area, but walked toward the spot where the object had been sighted, accompanied by the 18-year-old youth. They had been gone only briefly when they were drawn back on the run by the honking of the car horn.
They found the 22-year-old mother hunched protectively over her two small children, and the 16-year-old girl so wet with perspiration her hair was stuck to her forehead. She was trembling violently and was almost incoherent. She said a featureless creature, gorilla shaped and standing six feet high had approached the car. His movements were sluggish and he moved off into the brush when she honked the car horn.
Investigators from the Air Force and from a sub-committee of NICAP in Jamestown, N.Y., came out to examine the witnesses. They looked at scratches on the car that the picnickers said had not been there when they arrived at Presque Isle, and dents in the car roof that had not been there. But their attention was focused primarily on two diamond-shaped impressions, about 18 inches wide and six to eight inches deep which were found some 350 yards from where the car was parked. Similar cone-shaped impressions were found leading down to the water. Patrolmen who examined the imprints said they appeared to have been made by claws "as if you were to take four fingers and press hard on the sand." One of them thought the impressions looked as though someone had blown air into the sand "as if you blew through a straw."
Air Force Major William Hall, of Youngstown, took measurements and made casts of the impressions and checked for radiation. Tests were said to have been negative. "If they found anything of real value they haven't revealed it to me," Presque Isle Police Chief Dan Dascanio said. "But from watching them work and their reactions to what they have looked at it appears that they did find something of interest." The chief was admittedly impressed by the girl's story. "When she talked with an Air Force official . . . I could see that she made no attempt to fill in her story when she wasn't sure. When he asked her a specific question, she said 'yes' or 'no'. It was obvious that she made no attempt to guess at any of the answers." He described her as a "very credible" person and added "I've got to believe they saw something. . . ." He did not accept the suggestion that the girl had seen a bear since bears were uncommon to the region. But there was more serious consideration given to the UFO sighting than the "featureless creature." Samples from three spots of wet sand were bottled for analysis by the Air Force. The liquid was described as colorless, odorless and sticky to the touch. It was pointed out that most soft drinks, coffee, water etc., evaporate quickly on the beach. These spots remained for a day. One officer gave some of the wet sand to a relative who is a chemist for analysis. The report came back that when dry, the substance formed a colorless material that could be bent without breaking, like plastic. Material was believed to be silicon.
Pretoria, South Africa, September, 1965; Two policemen, Koos de Klerk and Jochn Lockem out on routine call on asphalt highway saw what appeared to be a "sea of flames" ahead of them. Ten seconds later, a top-shaped object took off at tremendous speed and disappeared in the northwest. They heard no noise but saw jets of flame spurting from two openings on the underside of the object. Examining the road, they found a circular area, six feet in diameter, still burning and grass scorched on both sides of the road. Samples of the asphalt were examined by a technician in the Public Works Department in Pretoria who said a gasoline fire could not possibly have caused the burning of the road surface.
continued on next page 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. 68 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.