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.
“Charles Fort”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Approved For Release 2004/03/26 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100040001-7 Security Information 25X1A It was interesting that in at least two cases reviewed that the object sighted was categorized by ___ as probably "Two Fighters", to date unexplained but not dangerous; they were not happy thus to dismiss the sightings by calling them names. It was their feeling that these phenomena are not beyond the domain of present knowledge of physical science however. It was the Panel's opinion that some of the Air Force concern over U.F.O.'s (notwithstanding Air Defense Command anxiety over Soviet 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 noondering lights". The implication being, three 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.
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.