Documents / Report

Robertson Panel Report

The Black Vault · 1953 · 29 pages · text from the file's own layer

This declassified CIA document, released through The Black Vault, reports on the meetings of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, which the Office of Scientific Intelligence convened on January 14 to 18, 1953. It includes a history of the sessions and the panel's informal comments, and it appends the formal report signed by H. P. Robertson and others. The panel found no evidence of a direct threat to national security. It recommended stripping UFOs of their special status and starting a public education program.

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Approved For Re.se ~001/08/07: CIA-RDP81R00560R-100030027-0
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officer (Project Officer, BLUEBOOK for 15 months) could not be
slighted. However, the Panel could not accept any of the cases
sighted by him because they were raw·, 1.mevaluated reports.
Terrestial explanations of the sightings were suggested in some
cases and in others the time of sighting was so short as to cause
suspicion of visual impressions. It was noted by and
others that extraterrestrial artifacts, if they did exist, are no
cause for alarm; rather, they are in the realm of natural phenomena
subject to scientific study, just as cosmic rays were at the time
of their discovery 20 to 30 years ago. This was an attitude in
whi6h did not concur, as he felt that such artifacts
ivould be of inunediate and great concern not only to the U. S. but
to all countries. (Nothing like a common threat to unite peoplesl)
lllllllllnoted that present astronomical knowledge of the solar
system m~~es the eixstence of intelligent beings (as we know the
term) elsewhere than on the earth extremely unlikely, and the
concentration of their attention by any controllable means confined
to any one continent of the earth quite preposterous.
TREMONTON, UTAH, SIGHTING
This case was considered significant because of the excellent
documentary evidence in the form of Kodachrome motion picture films
(about 1600 frames). The Panel studied these films, the case history,
ATIC's interpretation, and received a briefing by representatives of
the USN Photo Interpretation Laboratory on their analysis of the
film. This term had expend«d (at Air Force request) approximately
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Approved For Release 2001/08/07: CIA-RDP81R00560R000100030027-0
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Cases discussed

About this file

Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 29 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.