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.
“Nature”16 pages
Approved For Release 2001/04/08CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020012-7 individually or together may have outstanding importance in the accuracy of a person's report. These factors generally cannot be determined adequately. The psychological factors are: Mental conditioning by newspaper stories of earlier reported sightings. Individual emotional response with respect to the unknown. Desire for publicity resulting in "embroidering" of facts or complete fabrication. Emotion of chase of interceptor pilots. The major physiological factors are: General physical condition of the person at time of sighting: conditions of fatigue, anoxia. Existence and extent of eye strain immediately preceding sighting. Insufficient night adaptation. Now let us take up the explanations which have been used to account for well over a thousand cases. Under the category of: "Misinterpretation of identifiable objects.* ATIC feels that the most prevalent misinterpretations have been: free baleons, aircraft, astronomical bodies, atmospheric Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020012-7
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.