Documents / FOIA release
This declassified CIA memorandum, dated 18 December 1952 and released in 2001, was sent to the Director of Central Intelligence by H. Marshall Chadwell, Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence. It reports a briefing at the Air Technical Intelligence Center and finds no reasonable evidence that the objects are of foreign origin. It also plans a small panel of scientific consultants. An attached tab reviews the Tremonton film, a Maine light identified as Jupiter, and a Florida scoutmaster report.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Security Information TAB A ## 1. Motion Pictures, Tremonton, Utah This case involves the sighting and photographing (Kodachrome film) of ten bright lights moving across the sky on 2 July 1952 in rough formation. Source is a Chief Photographer's Mate, USN, with 17 years photographic experience. The local time was 1110; weather conditions bright, clear, no clouds. Objects appeared to be "milling about" while traveling in a westerly direction across the sky. Source was driving along the road when the sighting occurred. He stopped the car and photographed the event with his personal camera. Toward the end of the sighting, one object separated from the rest and reversed course across the sky. Status: ATIC Photographic Laboratory examination of the film resulted in following conclusions: a. 10 objects, all alike in movement and size. b. Decidedly improbable that they are birds or balloons. c. Exact nature cannot be determined, because they are visible only as small spots of light. It can be deduced, however, that they are either mon-spherical in shape and similar to bright metal in reflectance or else variably self-luminous. Objects which follow similar courses show similar brightness fluctuations which could be caused by their taking similar flight attitudes. d. Apparently a coordination of movement to some extent among these objects. They seem to move in formations which are probably 3-dimensional in arrangement. e. The movements suggest flight paths consisting of skew curves in space. f. The single object which reversed course remained reasonably uniform in brightness. It followed a nearly straight line path with reasonable uniformity of motion at an angular velocity of about 2.1/sec. (This is equivalent to the following speeds: 37 mph @500 yards; 75 mph @ 1000 yards; 373 mph @5000 yards; 756 mph @10,000 yards; etc.). g. It would probably be extremely difficult to imitate this photography for fraudulent purposes. This film is currently under examination by the U. S. Navy Photo Interpretation Laboratory, Anacostia. Estimated completion date: 15 January 1953.
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. 4 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.