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.
“United Press”5 pages
who was familiar with this report saw an anti-collision light installation on a Capital Airlines airplane. This new safety device, a light mounted on the nose of the airplane, oscillates back and forth laterally similar to those installed on some ambulances and police cars. A check with Capital Airlines revealed that an airplane fitted with such a light had "checked in" while flying near Pittsburgh at the exact time and place of the reporting sighting. Let us then now to astronomical phenomena. In the daytime some planets, particularly Venus, can be seen clearly as a bright white object, even at high noon under certain conditions. At night, meteors of various varieties have been mistaken for maneuvering lights. The luminous meteor trail of ionized gas has been picked up by radar and at times misunderstood. This ionized trail may remain visible to the eye for as long as one hour. Natural phenomena in the Earth's atmosphere have caused many misinterpretations. High altitude "jet streams" traveling at high velocities, temperature inversions and conditions of turbulent mixing of air of greatly different temperatures and densities exist and are not charted. They account for optical as well as radar aberrations in a number of cases. In one case
Memo, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 36 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.