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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.
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# Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIA-RDP81R00560R0100030027-0
1000 man-hours of professional and sub-professional time in the preparation of graph plots of individual frames of the film, showing apparent and relative motion of objects and variation in their light intensity. It was the opinion of the P.I.L. representatives that the objects sighted were not birds, balloons or aircraft, were "not reflections because there was no blinking while passing through $ 6 0^{\circ} $ of arc" and were, therefore, "self-luminous". Plots of motion and variation in light intensity of the objects were displayed. While the Panel Members were impressed by the evident enthusiasm, industry and extent of effort of the P.I.L. team, they could not accept the conclusions reached. Some of the reasons for this were as follows:
a. A semi-spherical object can readily produce a reflection of sunlight without "blinking" through $ 6 0^{\circ} $ of arc travel.
b. Although no data was available on the "albedo" of birds or polyethylene ballons in bright sunlight, the apparent motions, sizes and brightnesses of the objects were considered strongly to suggest birds, particularly after the Panel viewed a short film showing high reflectivity of seagulls in bright sunlight.
c. P.I.L. description of the objects sighted as "circular, bluish-white" in color would be expected in cases of spectacular reflections of sunlight from convex surfaces where the brilliance of the reflection would obscure other portions of the object.
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Approved For Release 2001/08/07 : CIFA-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.