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
overhead, travelling in a northwesterly direction. I believed that the object was a flying disc and was about to run to the house and fetch my camera when I noticed that the object was below the level of some vultures maneuvering at a great height. This proved to me that the disc-like object was considerably smaller than a vulture. During the course of two hours I saw a total of three of these objects, all going in the same direction, but at times appearing to be stationary. Later in the afternoon I found one of these 'discs' on my front lawn. It was a seed enclosed in a fluffy mass of silken fiber . . . . Bad it not been for the soaring birds and my curiosity, I would undoubtedly have reported that I had seen several 'flying discs'. . . . I am enclosing the 'flying disc' which I captured...in my front yard." Another misinterpretation is that of searchlights on clouds which has in the cause of several reports of sightings as in the recent case described by the Secretary of Defense. Finally, there is a case which occurred at Frenchmen's Flat, Nevada. "Blips" in formation were picked up on the radar scope. They were
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.