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.
data related to UFO's. However, it was recognized that such action would tend to allay public concern in the subject until an educational program had taken effect. It was believed that procurement of these cameras was partly the result of public pressure in July 1952. With the poor results of the year-long Project TWINKLE program of 24-hour instrumentation watch (two frames of film showing nothing distinguishable), a widespread program of skywatching would not be expected to yield much direct data of value. There was considerable discussion of a possible "sky patrol" by amateur astronomers and by wide-angle cameras. It was pointed out that at present a considerable fraction of the sky is now -- and has been for many years -- under surveillance every clear night in several meteor and aurora observing programs as well as sky mapping programs at the various locations listed below. Although the attention of these astronomers is largely directed toward identified rather than unidentified objects, no case of any striking unidentified object is known to the Panel. Such an object would most certainly be reported if found on patrol plates. A case was cited where an astronomer refused to interrupt his exposure in order to photograph an alleged sighting in a different part of the sky, suggesting that if
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.