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 2001/04/02 CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020012-7 Security information reported to be traveling at terrific speed at 30,000 feet. It happened that the reporting station had a searchlight and it was turned on in the direction of the radar sighting. It was immediately discovered that the objects were Canadian geese flying at 300 feet altitude. The above explanations are believed by ATIC to account for some 80% of the sightings reported. They feel that the remaining 20% might be reducible to 10% were it not for these reasons: Insufficient information reported. Incorrect information unwittingly or purposely reported. This still leaves ATIO with a possible 10% of sightings for which there is no available explanation. Considering that the remaining cases might have been caused by little understood natural phenomena, the OSI Panel conferred at length with three of our consultants in Boston. These men are outstanding in the fields of geophysics, electronics and chemistry. They emphasized to us that there
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.