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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R02560R000100020017-2 Trend studies as well as area studies could be made. There is now no picture of how the various phenomena may have formed patterns, either as regards aggregation or dispersal over specific periods of time. Finally, there might be an objective study on the attributes of available data. Thus far, reports themselves (not factors present within these reports) are only classed "explainable" or "not explained". It is not known to what extent, or where, elements of consistency may extend through both the collection of "explainable" and "not explainod" reports. Also, there is no means by which to sort out valid elements from otherwise "unreliable" reports, nor is there a means by which to sort out invalid elements from otherwise accurate reports. An illustration of a consequence of this limitation would be the probable unhappy fate of a valid report on what was actually arionized cloud, when observed on a well established balloon track. It would, in all probability be classed "explainable" as a balloon. The relegation of this report to the "explained" category would take any valid elements present in the report out of the reach of later analysis. In summary, the limited central administrative support given to the project by Air Force, coupled with the extremely limited scope of the analytical work SECRET Approved For Release 2001/04/02 CJA-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.