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.
“foo fighter”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
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 60° 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:
2. A semi-spherical object can readily produce a reflection of sunlight without "blinking" through $ 6 0^{\circ} $ of are travel.
6. Although no data was available on the "albedo" of birds or polyethylene balloons in bright sunlight, the apparent actions, 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.
e. P.I.L. description of the objects sighted as "circular, white-white" in color would be expected in cases of optical reflections of sunlight from convex surfaces where the brilliance of the reflection would obscure other portions of the object. 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.