Documents / Official release

_Transmission-of-CIA-Scientific-Advisory-Panel-Rept_1953

U.S. Department of War · 1953 · 7 pages · text by OCR

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.

indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.

4. In order most effectively to strengthen the national facilities for the timely recognition and the appropriate handling of true indicati of hostile action, and to minimize the concomitant dangers alluded to above, the Panel recommends:

Cases discussed

About this 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.