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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Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R560R000100020017-2 Of the essential processes that might be used if Air Force considered the inquiry worth a full blown effort, we could list the following: Research objectives should be defined in detail in relation to the questionnaire. The questions asked in the present collection directive are admitted to be inadequate even for the limited case-history approach. Further, the answers are not processed in such a way as to easily permit the determination of the lines of research and analysis that should be followed. As there has been no preliminary determination of areas of most profitable research, there is no way at this time by which to isolate the important elements in each of the problem areas. No studies have been made, for example, to establish categories of the objects reported by shape, size, color, etc. or to show such things as shortest, longest and average duration of sightings of objects of various kinds. These deficiencies have conspired against making cross-comparisons. There These deficiencies have conspired against making cross-comparisons. There have been no studies, for example, that would compare certain weather conditions with the appearance of certain colors of lights.
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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.