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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
In other words, the burden of proof is on the sighter, not the explainer.
Potential Related Dangers.
The Panel Members were in agreement that although evidence of any direct threat from these sightings was wholly lacking, related dangers might well exist resulting from:
a. Misidentification of actual enemy artifacts by defense personnel.
b. Overloading of emergency reporting channels with "false" information ("noiseto signal ratio").
c. Subjectivity of public to mass hysteria and greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.
The first two of these problems may seriously affect the Air Defense intelligence system, and should be studied by experts, possibly under ADC. If UFO's become discredited in a reaction to the "flying saucer" scare, or if reporting channels are saturated with false and poorly documented reports, our capability of detecting hostile activity will be reduced. More competent screening or filtering of reported sightings at or near the source is 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.