Documents / Memo

FLYING SAUCERS memo

CIA Reading Room · 36 pages · text by OCR

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.

Open the PDF at page 18 Original source ↗

“temperature inversion”4 pages

  • p. 17 …e.g., refractions and reflections caused by temperature inversions, ionization phenomena, ball lightning, etc. III. Not…
  • p. 20 …recent Washington reports were probably due to "temperature inversions"; and that the unexplained sightings could not…
  • p. 29 …High altitude "jet streams" traveling at high velocities, temperature inversions and conditions of turbulent mixing of…
  • p. 33 …In the field of atmospherics would be the temperature inversions stressed by General Samford. This phenomenon…
# SECRET

defense could not operate effectively if the Air Force were constantly called upon to intercept mirages which persons had mistaken for enemy aircraft.

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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.