Documents / Analysis
Special Report No. 14 was issued by the U.S. Air Force's Air Technical Intelligence Center on 5 May 1955. It is a statistical study of about 4,000 reports of unidentified aerial objects from June 1947 to December 1952. The reports were reduced to IBM punched cards and analyzed with methods including chi square tests. The report concludes that the reports it examined are very unlikely to represent technology beyond present scientific knowledge, and it notes that no case produced valid physical evidence.
“Jet Propulsion Laboratory”1 page
CONCLUSIONS It can never be absolutely proven that "flying saucers" do not exist. This would be true if the data obtained were to include complete scientific measurements of the attributes of each sighting, as well as complete and detailed descriptions of the objects sighted. It might be possible to demon- strate the existence of "flying saucers" with data of this type, IF_ they were to exist. Although the reports considered in this study usually did not contain scientific measurements of the attributes of each sighting, it was possible to establish certain valid conclusions by the application of statistical methods in the treatment of the data. Scientifically evaluated^.nd arranged, the data as awhpje did not show any marked patterns or trends. The in- accuracies inherent in this type of data, in addition to the incompleteness of a large proportion,of the reports, may have obscured any patterns or trends that otherwise would have been evident. This absence of indicative relation- ships necessitated an exhaustive study of selected facets of the data in order to draw any valid conclusions. A critical examination of the distributions of the important char- acteristics of sightings, plus an intensive study of the sightings evaluated as UNKNOWN, led to the conclusion that a combination of factors, prin- cipally the reported maneuvers of the objects and the unavailability of supplemental data such as aircraft flight plans or balloon-launching records, resulted in the failure to identify as KNOJ^NS most of the reports of objects classified as UNKNOWNS. An intensive study, aimed at finding a verified example of a "flying saucer" or at deriving a verified model or models of "flying saucers" (as defined on Page 1), led to the conclusion that neither goal could be attained using the present data. It is emphasized that there was a complete lack of any valid evidence consisting of physical matter in any case of a reported unidentified aerial object. Thus, the probability that any of the UNKNOWNS considered in this study are "flying saucers" is concluded to be extremely small, since the most complete and reliable reports from the present data, when isolated and studied, conclusively failed to reveal even a rough model, and since the data as a whole failed to reveal any marked patterns or trends. Therefore, on the basis of this evaluation of the information, it is considered to be highly improbable that any of the reports of unidentified aerial objects examined in this study represent observations of technologi- cal developments outside the range of present-day scientific knowledge. 94
Analysis, from the classic collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 309 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.