Current Status Of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) Project.

This three-page memo, dated 17 December 1953, went from the head of the CIA’s Physics and Electronics Division to the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence. Written months after the agency’s Robertson panel, it summarizes who in the government was still working on UFOs and how little effort that amounted to.

The state of play

The Air Force’s interest was described as declining. At the Air Technical Intelligence Center, Project Blue Book was run by one officer, one airman and a secretary, no longer did its own field investigations, and was being shifted toward Air Defense Command, whose interceptors were sometimes sent after reports. About ten percent of the past year’s sightings had been left unsolved. A program to fit radar sites and control towers with stereo cameras carrying diffraction gratings, to capture a UFO’s light spectrum, had stalled: most of the gratings had come away from their mounts. A statistical study of sightings from 1947 to 1952 was nearly done; it became Special Report No. 14 (CIA-UAP-015). The Navy gave the subject part of one analyst’s time; the Army almost none.

Abroad, the memo notes press stories about a Canadian government “laboratory” for observing the phenomena, rumored saucer experiments at A. V. Roe in Toronto, and that Britain was only filing reports.

A blunt verdict on the books

The author suggests the drop in 1953 reports could be put down to the panel’s advice to strip UFOs of their mystery, and calls a popular book claiming contact with visitors “so nonsensical and obviously fraudulent” that it might calm the public.