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.
translation and transcription from reports to punched cards, indicated that there would be relatively few specific variables or factors that would yield meaningful correlation studies. Either the original data were too subjective, or the incompleteness of the original reports would seriously reduce the sample of a specific variable.
Preliminary tabulations of various sortings substantiated the impossibility of deriving statistical results from certain variables, such as movement of the observer during the sighting, sound, shape parameter, size, angular velocity and acceleration, appearance and disappearance bearing, initial and final elevation, altitude, and orientation of the object. The statistically usable variables presented in this study include the date, time, location, duration, reliability, and method of observation of the sighting, and the physical attributes of number, color, speed, shape, light brightness, and identification of the objects sighted.
The presentation of frequency and percentage distributions of any of the variables must be interpreted in the light of the sample of incidents represented. For example, the analysis of the reported colors of the objects sighted, based on ALL SIGHTINGS, could lead to misrepresentation of the distribution of the reported color of the objects, because of the multiplicity of reports on some of the phenomena. On the other hand, the percentage distribution of the light brightness reported by each observer is more likely to be correct than a distribution based on one report for each phenomenon. To assure that the most nearly correct presentation was made, and to avoid the possibility of failure to uncover any pattern or trend inherent in the data, the variables were studied on five different bases or samples. These samples, and their numerical relation to each other, were as follows:
$$
\text {A L L S I G H T I N G S (a l l r e p o r t s)} - 3, 2 0 1 \mathrm {c a r d s}
$$
$$
\text {U N I T S I G H T I N G S}, \text {a l l o b s e r v e r s} - 2, 5 5 4 \mathrm {c a r d s}
$$
$$
\text {U N I T S I G H T I N G S}, \text {s i n g l e o b s e r v e r} - 2, 2 3 2 \text {c a r d s}
$$
$$
\text{UNIT SIGHTINGS, multiple observers} - 322 \text{ cards}
$$
$$
\text {O B J E C T S I G H T I N G S} - 2, 1 9 9 \mathrm {c a r d s}
$$
The preliminary tabulations indicated that the samples based on UNIT SIGHTINGS, single observer, and UNIT SIGHTINGS, multiple observers, would not add materially to this study. Accordingly, although the frequency distributions were recorded and are available for study, they are not presented in this report.
The bases of ALL SIGHTINGS, UNIT SIGHTINGS (referring to all observers), and OBJECT SIGHTINGS are presented in Appendix A as Tables A1 through A240. A critical study of these tabulations reveals that there is no apparent change in the distribution of any variable from one basis to another, and that no marked patterns or trends exist in any sample. 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.