14 August 1952
(Central
Intelligence Agency , Washington
Quote from the document:
“During the
past weeks, with the phenomenal increase
in the number of Flying Saucer reports (my emphasis) there has been a
tremendous stimulation of both public and official interest in the
subject. Requests for information have
poured into the Air Force, including an official inquiry from the White
House. Finally on July 29, General
Samford held a press conference in which he stated, that analysis showed ‘no
pattern of anything remotely consistent with any menace to the United States;’
that recent Washington sightings were possibly due to ‘temperature inversions,’
others to ionized clouds, ice formations, etc.; that instrumentation would be
emphasized henceforth in the Air Force Study.
He emphatically stated that the unexplained sightings could not have
resulted from any experiments or tests conducted by the United States
At this
point, OSI felt that it would be timely to make an evaluation of the Air Force
Study, its methodology and coverage, the relation of its conclusions to various
theories which have been propounded, and to try to reach some conclusion as to
the intelligence implications of the problem
(my emphasis) – if any. In view of the wide interest within the
Agency (my emphasis), this briefing has been arranged so that we could
report on the survey. It must be mentioned that the outside
knowledge of Agency interest in Flying Saucers carries the risk of making the
problem more serious in the public mind that it already is, which we and the
Air Force agree must be avoided (my emphasis).
In order to
supply both breadth and depth to the survey we have reviewed our own
intelligence, going back to the Swedish sightings of 1946; reviewed a large
number of individual official reports, recent press and magazine coverage and
the main popular books. Indexes of the
Soviet press were scanned. We
interviewed a representative of the Air Force Special Studies Group. Following this, we spent a day at Wright
Field in a thorough discussion with the officers conducting the ATIC study, and
finally we took the problem to a selected group of our own consultants, all
leaders in their scientific fields.
From all
this, we have come up with facts, theories, explanations and some conclusions,
which we will cover in a brief summary of Flying Saucers history, an analysis
of the ATIC work, and a discussion of the explained sightings and of possible theories regarding the unexplained
(my emphasis). We make no
recommendations of action. We would ask
that questions be held until the end.”
(wikimedia.org image)