Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency briefing text on flying saucers, released in 2001, gives the Office of Scientific Intelligence's survey of the Air Force study after General Samford's July 29 press conference. It traces reports from Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting through Mantell, Gorman and White Sands, and describes ATIC's classes of sightings and figures on unexplained cases. It weighs four theories and finds no evidence for Russian or interplanetary origins. A draft National Security Council directive tasking the DCI with UFO research is attached.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Approved For Rel R000100020013-6 moving light below him -- also seen from the field -- and for twenty minutes put on a dog-fight with it, finally, being outdistanced at 17,000 feet. The third incident occurred in April 1949 at White Sands Proving Ground when a Navy Commander, tracking a missile flight by theodolite, watched two discs maneuvering at high speed around the test rocket. Three such sightings were made at White Sands within a month. Meanwhile in 1948, Air Force initiated Project Saucer to study the phenomena, issued a preliminary report in April 1949 and in December 1949 released sections of its secret report to the press. The conclusion was that the sightings stemmed from three causes: 1. Mass hysteria 2. Hallucination and hoax 3. Misinterpretation of known objects This satisfied much of the public but not certain sensational writers. The resulting highly speculative books and magazine articles combined with continued reports of sightings built up such a resurgence of public interest that Air Force, early in 1951, reopened its study, instituted a world-wide reporting system, and alerted its bases to intercept the
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. 11 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.