Documents / Memo
This CIA file, released in 2001, gathers 1952 memoranda from H. Marshall Chadwell, Assistant Director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, to the Director of Central Intelligence, along with draft letters to the Secretary of Defense and the NSC and a briefing on the Air Force position. It concludes that flying saucers carry national security implications, namely mass panic and air defense vulnerability. It recommends expanded scientific research, a public information policy and study of Soviet interest, noting that about 20 percent of roughly 1500 Air Force reports remained unexplained.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Approved For Release 2001/04/02 CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020012-7 Security Information knowledge is achieved of the causes back of the sightings - the little understood phenomena has described - we will run the in-creasing risk of false alerts and the even greater danger of tabbing the real as false. This is primarily an operational research problem but as long as it exists it will have intelligence implications because of its bearing on air vulnerability. One purpose in this survey has been to examine what is being done and make some assessment of its validity. The Air Force study is valid. On a case by case basis, the great bulk of the sightings have been and will continue to be explained but the limited case approach will never solve this second real problem positive identification. As to what should be done, we propose to discuss the research problem with the Research and Development Board and to pass on to Air Force an offer to assist in a study of some of the fundamentals. We suggest that the psychological possibilities both for and against us should be investigated. From an intelligence point of view, OSI has been and will continue watching Russian research and development in the scientific fields involved. Approved For Release 2001/04/023 CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020012-7
Memo, cited by the archive. 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. 36 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.