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.
with the year 1952. In these charts, 3201 cases have been used. As the study progressed, a constant program was maintained for the purpose of making comparisons between the current cases received after 1 January 1953, and those being used for the report. This was done in order that any change or significant trend which might arise from current developments could be incorporated in the summary of this report. The 1953 and 1954 cases show a general and expected trend of increasing percentages in the finally identified categories. They also show decreasing percentages in categories where there was insufficient information and those where the phenomena could not be explained. This trend had been anticipated in the light of improved reporting and investigating procedures. Official reports on hand at the end of 1954 totaled 4834. Of these, 425 were produced in 1953 and 429 in 1954. These 1953 and 1954 individual reports (a total of 854), were evaluated on the same basis as were those received before the end of 1952. The results are as follows: Balloons -16% Aircraft -20% Astronomical -25% Other -13% Insufficient Info -17% Unknown -9% As the study of the current cases progressed, it became increasingly obvious that if reporting and investigating procedures could be further improved, the percentages of those cases which contained insufficient information and those remaining unexplained would be greatly reduced. The key to a higher percentage of solutions appeared to be in rapid "on the spot" investigations by trained personnel. On the basis of this, a revised program was established by AF Reg. 200-2 Subject: "Unidentified Flying Objects Reporting" (Short Title: UFOB) dated 12 August 1954. This new program, which had begun to show marked results before January 1955, provided primarily that the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron (Air Defense Command) would carry out all field investigations. This squadron has sufficient units and is so deployed as to be able to arrive "on the spot" within a very short time after a report is received. After treatment by the 4602d AISS, all information is supplied to the Air Technical Intelligence Center for final evaluation. This cooperative program has resulted, since 1 January 1955, in reducing the insufficient information cases to 7% and the unknown cases to 3%, of the totals. The period 1 January 1955 to 5 May 1955 accounted for 131 unidentified aerial object reports received. Evaluation percentages of these are as follows:
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.