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This declassified CIA memorandum, dated 16 February 1953, reports on the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, which met January 14 to 18, 1953. It gives a session-by-session history of the meetings, along with panel comments left out of the formal report, including a critique of the Navy's analysis of the Tremonton film. The appended panel report, signed by chairman H. P. Robertson and others, found no direct threat to national security. It recommended stripping UFOs of their special status and starting a public education and debunking program.
“Charles Fort”1 page
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# Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP81R00560R0100030027-0 # Security Information have been so labeled. It was interesting that in at least two cases reviewed that the object sighted was categorized by ## 25X1A 25X1A as probably "Foo Fighters" to date unexplained but not dangerous; they were not happy thus to dismiss the sightings be calling them names. It was their feeling that these phenomena are not beyond the domain of present knowledge of physical science, however. AIR FORCE REPORTING SYSTEM It was the panel's opinion that some of the Air Force concern over U.F.O.'s (notwithstanding Air Defense Command anxiety over fast radar tracks) was probably caused by public pressure. The result today is that the Air Force has instituted a fine channel for receiving reports of nearly anything anyone sees in the sky and fails to understand. This has been particularly encouraged in popular articles on this and other subjects, such as space travel and science fiction. The result is the mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication with material quite irrelevant to hostile objects that might some day appear. The Panel agreed generally that this mass of poor-quality reports containing little, if any, scientific data was of no value. Quite the opposite, it was possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in "nocturnal meandering lights." The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or might be potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for deemphasization made itself apparent. Comments on a possible educational program are enumerated below. SECRET Security Information Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100030027-0
Document, cited by the archive. 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. 28 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.