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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
forgetting the subjectivity of the data at the time that conclusions are drawn from the analysis. It must be emphasized, again and again, that any conclusions contained in this report are based NOT on facts, but on what many observers thought and estimated the true facts to be.
Altogether, the data for this study consisted of approximately 4,000 reports of sightings of unidentified aerial objects. The majority were received through military channels or in the form of observer-completed questionnaires; a few were accepted in the form of direct letters from unquestionably reliable sources. Sightings made between June, 1947, and December, 1952, were considered for this study. Sightings alleged to have occurred prior to 1947 were not considered, since they were not reported to official sources until after public interest in "flying saucers" had been stimulated by the popular press.
## REDUCTION OF DATA TO MECHANIZED COMPUTATION FORM
As received by the Air Technical Intelligence Center, the sighting reports were not in a form suitable for even a quasi-scientific study. A preliminary review of the data indicated the need for standardized interrogation procedures and supplemental forms for the reduction of currently held and subsequently acquired data to a form amenable to scientific appraisal.
The plan for reduction of the data to usable form consisted of a program of development comprising four major steps: (1) a systematic listing of the factors necessary to evaluate the observer and his report, and to identify the unknown object observed; (2) a standard scheme for the transfer of data to a mechanized computation system; (3) an orderly means of relating the original data to all subsequent forms; and (4) a consistent procedure for the identification of the phenomenon described by the original data.
## Questionnaire
The first reports received by ATIC varied widely in completeness and quality. Air Force Letter 200-5 $ ^{(2)} $ and Air Force Form 112 $ ^{(1)} $ were attempts to fix responsibility for and improve the quality of the reports of sightings. To coordinate past efforts and to provide standardization for the 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.