Documents / FOIA release

(Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Aerial Objects)

Central Intelligence Agency · 2005-07-12 · 312 pages · text by GLM-OCR

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.

  • p. 78 …Apparently these are harder to identify. ## (3) Shape In this case, there is a higher percentage…

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## Approved For Release 2005/07/20 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100060001-5

## (4) Duration of observation

Here there is an excess of KNOWNS in the less-than 5-second group. Again, the majority of KNOWNS in this group are astronomical. The greater proportion of UNKNOWNS in the 31- to 60-second and 61-second to 5-minute groups cannot be explained.

## (5) Speed

The major contribution to chi square for this characteristic is due to a large excess of UNKNOWNS in the over 400-mph class. It can be assumed that some of the excessive speeds are inaccuracies in estimates by observers. However, some radar sightings, which are practically impossible to identify, show objects with speeds of 1,000 to 2,000 mph and over, and these reports account for a number of these UNKNOWNS.

## (6) Light brightness

Since this chi square was not significant, it is not necessary to discuss it here.

An examination of these discrepancies thus brings up a very interesting point. In every case for which there is a significant excess of KNOWNS over UNKNOWNS, the excess can be attributed to an excess of identifiable astronomical phenomena. This would seem to lead to the conclusion that astronomical phenomena are easy to identify and there are very few left in the UNKNOWNS. Accordingly, the astronomical object sightings were deleted from the KNOWN object sightings and the Chi Square Test was again applied. The results are shown in Tables VIII through XIII, where in this case the KNOWNS do not contain astronomical sightings.

It will be noted that some groups were combined when the adjusted number of KNOWNS was ten or less, except for the case for which the number of objects per sighting was the characteristic studied. These were borderline cases, and no good combination of groups existed.

It is apparent that the deletion of astronomical sightings gives a better fit, although the decision is not clear cut, since for two cases (light brightness and speed), the chi square increased. However, it can again be pointed out that the reporting of these two characteristics is highly subjective and is open to question. The estimation of speed is especially open to question because of the impossibility of accurately determining it visually.

Cases discussed

About this file

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.