Documents / FOIA release
This CIA-released copy of Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 is dated 5 May 1955 and comes from the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It is a statistical analysis of about 4,000 unidentified aerial object reports from 1947 through 1952, coded onto IBM punched cards with the help of a panel of scientists. The report concludes that such objects were highly unlikely to be technological developments beyond present-day scientific knowledge. It also found no valid evidence of physical matter.
“Harder”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
These 12 sightings can be classed into four categories on the basis of their shapes, as follows: (1) Propeller shape - Case I (2) Aircraft shape-Cases II and III (3) Cigar shape - Cases IV and V (4) Elliptical or disc shape - Cases VI to XII The criterion for choosing the above sightings was that their descriptions were given in enough detail to permit diagrams of the objects to be drawn. It might be noted here that in all but one of these cases (Case XI) the observer had already drawn a diagram of what he had seen. The objective of this section of the study was the conceiving of a model, or models. The requirement that the description be detailed is an important one, and was the easiest to determine in the re-evaluation program. However, a good model ought to satisfy the following conditions as well: (1) The general shape of the object and the maneuvers it performed should fit the reports of many of the UNKNOWNS and thus explain them. (2) The observer and the report should be reliable. (3) The report should contain elements which should have been observed with accuracy, and which eliminate the possibility that the sighting could be ascribed to a familiar object or to a known natural phenomenon. (4) The model should be derived from two or more good UNKNOWNS between which there is no essential conflict. It can be shown that it is not possible to deduce a model from the 12 cases that will satisfy all of these conditions. The following case-by-case discussion of the 12 good UNKNOWNS will illustrate this point: (1) Case I does not satisfy Conditions 1 and 4. The reported shape of this object is not duplicated in any of the other UNKNOWNS. (2) Case II does not satisfy Conditions 1 and 3. There are very few UNKNOWNS in the aircraft shape classification. In addition, the unusual characteristic of this sighting (i.e., the red glow) could have been reflection of the lights of Flint from the objects if they were either birds or aircraft.
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. 312 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.