Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency release, approved in 2004, collects 1966 memoranda on Air Force requests to declassify the 1953 report of the scientific panel on unidentified flying objects that the Office of Scientific Intelligence convened. The memos trace the USAF requests of July 1966, the press interest behind them, and the 15 August forwarding of a sanitized version with CIA references removed. The attached panel comments found no threat to national security, judged the Tremonton film to probably show birds, and recommended a training and debunking program.
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# COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS OF UFO PANEL ## General. The Panel Members were impressed with the lack of sound data in the great majority of case histories. Among the case histories of significant sightings discussed in detail were the following: Bellefontaine, Ohio (1 August 1952); Tremonton, Utah (2 July 1952); Great Falls, Montana (15 August 1950); Yaak, Montana (1 September 1952); Washington, D.C. area (19 July 1952); and Haneda A.F.B., Japan (5 August 1952), Port Huron, Michigan (29 July 1952); and Presque Isle, Maine (10 October 1952). After review and discussion of these cases (and about 15 others, in less detail), the Panel concluded that reasonable explanations could be suggested for most sightings and "by deduction and scientific method it could be induced (given additional data) that other cases might be explained in a similar manner". The Panel pointed out that because of the brevity of some sightings (e.g., 2-3 seconds) and the inability of the witnesses to express themselves clearly (semantics) that conclusive explanations could not be expected for every case reported. Furthermore, it was considered that, normally, it would be a great waste of effort to try to solve most of the sightings, unless such
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. 53 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.