Documents / Official release
This declassified file from the U.S. Department of War, dated March 1953, contains a Secretary of Defense routing slip and a 13 March 1953 CIA cover letter from Richard D. Drain of the Intelligence Advisory Committee. The letter sends the Secretary of Defense a report by a panel of scientists on "Unidentified Flying Objects." General Smith convened the panel. The letter says its conclusions point to potential dangers to national security, including the cultivation of a morbid national psychology that hostile propaganda could exploit.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 This file contains a copy of the CIA's 1953 "Report of the Scientific Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects" that was sent to the Secretary of Defense.
COSMIC MATERIAL 1. Do not send through the mail. 2. May be handled only by specifically authorized per- sonnel. 4. Do not release without receipt. 3. Deliver to OSD Sub-Registry, Classified Records Group, Correspondence Control Section, Executive Office of the Secretary, if to be transmitted to any office other than the one to which routed from the OSD Sub-Registry or to any office outside of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. 1. Do not send through the mail. 2. May be handled only by authorized personnel. TOP SECRET SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL 1. May be sent by registered mail if delivered to classified Records Group, Correspondence Control Section, Executive Office of the Secretary. GENERAL (Top Secret, Secret and Confidential) 2. May be handled only by authorized personnel. 1. Do not release without receipt. 2. Deliver to Classified Records Group, Correspondence Control Section, Executive Office of the Secretary, if to be transmitted outside of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. When transferring this Routing Slip to another person or office within OSD, without going through the Correspondence Control Section, obtain a signature on one of the receipts provided at the bottom of this form and return the receipt to the Correspondence Control Section for appropriate change in charge out. 4. Indicate in Comment Section the disposition of all copies and inclosures if other than file in Corres- pendence Control Section. 5. Do not remove this Routing Slip from the Original of the attached material without authority of the Head, Records and Reference Unit, Correspondence Control Section or one of his representatives. Return this Routing Slip and the attached material to the Correspondence Control Section as soon as possible for file
Official release, from the pursue collection. 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. 7 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.