What happened
After the Washington radar sightings of July 1952 alarmed the Truman White House, the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence asked a panel of eminent scientists to judge whether UFOs threatened national security. Chaired by physicist H. P. Robertson, the group, which included future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, met in secret for four days in January 1953. Project Blue Book's Edward Ruppelt and others briefed them on selected cases, and they watched the Tremonton and Great Falls films repeatedly. They found no evidence of a direct threat or of anything requiring new science. Their bigger worry was the reports themselves: that floods of sightings could clog military communications, mask a real attack and breed a morbid national mood that hostile propaganda could exploit. They recommended stripping UFOs of their special status through training and public 'debunking', using films, schools and even Disney cartoons, and suggested watching civilian saucer groups for subversive potential. The report was classified Secret and was published, with deletions, only in 1969.
The original account
We firmly believe that there is no residuum of cases which indicates phenomena which are attributable to foreign artifacts capable of hostile acts, and that there is no evidence that the phenomena indicates a need for the revision of current scientific concepts. ... the Panel recommends: a. That the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.
Report of the Scientific Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Tab A, January 1953 (CIA document, declassified; US government, public domain; Condon Report Appendix U)
The official explanation
Defenders note that the panel reviewed the best cases the Air Force had and reasonably concluded none showed a threat or new physics; its concern was air defence in the early Cold War, when false alarms were a real operational danger. CIA historian Gerald Haines presents it as a measured security review. The panel's unanimous view was that reasonable explanations could be suggested for most sightings and that further study would likely explain the rest.
The anomalous case
Critics argue that four days was far too short to evaluate years of reports. The panel spent much of its time on two films and dismissed a two-month Navy laboratory analysis of the Tremonton film without running the field tests it said were needed. Its central recommendation was not more research but a public-relations campaign to reduce interest, plus monitoring of civilian groups such as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators and APRO. Ruppelt, who briefed the panel, wrote that no one there gave a second thought to super-secret US or Soviet aircraft. Proponents argue the panel's policy, not the evidence, shaped two decades of official dismissal, and that its secrecy, with members' names still blacked out when the report appeared in the 1969 Condon Report, fed justified distrust.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (Robertson Panel), Condon Report Appendix U official, files.ncas.org
- The CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 (Gerald K. Haines), CIA PDF official, cia.gov
Sources
- Condon Report, Appendix U: Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs (Robertson Panel), January 1953 National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
- CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 (Gerald K. Haines, Studies in Intelligence, 1997) Federation of American Scientists (reprint of CIA article)
- Robertson Panel Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.