Documents / FOIA release
This CIA document, approved for release on 2 April 2001, contains a memorandum from Director Walter B. Smith to the Director of the Psychological Strategy Board, along with a staff study by the Office of Scientific Intelligence on flying saucers. The study treats unidentified flying objects as a national security problem that matters for operations, intelligence and psychological warfare. It criticizes the small Air Force project at ATIC under Captain E. J. Ruppelt and recommends a centrally administered research program.
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of Special Investigation for direct interrogation of the reporter. Also, in some cases the reports are referred to technical or scientific specialists for interpretation. It should be borne in mind that this is all on an individual case basis. There has been no systematic or extensive use of other standard methods of processing data. It is true that there have been a few attempts to examine some of the broader questions that have been raised by these reports. ATIC has, for example, laboriously gone through the accumulation of "unexplained" US reports, one by one, to plot them on a map. These plots show a high incidence of reported cases near atomic installations and Strategic Air Command bases but this might be expected because of the greater number of alert observers in such places. Actually, a number of accepted research techniques that should be used in any effort to gain a sound understanding of these phenomena, have not been employed. There is, of course, some doubt regarding the extent and kind of effort required for the future. The Air Force has not yet found any great cause for concern. Captain Ruppelt remarked that, as the problem seems to be of more concern to operations than to intelligence, it might appropriately be moved out of intelligence to some operational command. (Within the last two weeks, he Approved For Release 2001/04/02: CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020017-2
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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. 16 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.