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
In the daytime, aircraft, particularly those that are unpainted, can give extremely brilliant reflections of sunlight. An interesting case under known conditions is one which occurred last year in Maryland. A group of aircraft design engineers went into the country to witness tests of their own jet airplane. The three test aircraft, with unpainted wings and red fuselages, passed directly overhead. All engineers agreed that if they had not known what the objects were, and since they could not observe the silver wings against the sky, they would have reported the red fuselages as flaming trails and they would have imagined objects emitting them. At nighttime the possibility for misinterpretation of aircraft increases. First, there are the dusk and dawn illuminations already mentioned. Similarly, misinterpretations have been made of running lights or reflections of aircraft in clouds. There are a number of reports of cylindrical objects with square tails or having lighted "portholes" which have been explained as distorted images of conventional aircraft profiles on clouds of ice crystals. Some time ago a pulsating bright yellow light was reported moving through the sky near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For months this report was relegated to the "unexplained" file. A few weeks ago in Washington a man 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.