On July 2, 1952, Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse pulled over on Highway 30 across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. His wife and two young children were in the car. Newhouse, a career Navy photographer, took out his 16mm motion picture camera and filmed about a minute of bright objects moving in formation across the sky.
The film went to the Navy’s Photographic Interpretation Laboratory at Anacostia. The lab spent more than one thousand man-hours on frame-by-frame analysis. The written conclusion: not aircraft, not balloons, not birds. Unidentified.
Six months later, five physicists watched the same film for part of one morning in a Pentagon conference room and called it seagulls.
That is the Robertson Panel.
The Central Intelligence Agency convened it, not the Air Force. On September 24, 1952, H. Marshall Chadwell, Assistant Director of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, signed a memorandum classified Secret to Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith. The subject line read Flying Saucers.
Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.
The CIA’s own Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence put on paper, to the Director, that the sightings clustered over American defense installations and could not be explained as natural phenomena or known aircraft.
In the next paragraph of the same memorandum, Chadwell defined the security problem.
Public concern with the phenomena indicates that a fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible. In this fact lies the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic.
Chadwell’s worry was Soviet exploitation. A first strike could be masked behind a flood of UFO reports clogging the air defense channels. He wanted Smith to authorize a program to reduce the reports.
The CIA’s Intelligence Advisory Committee approved on December 4, 1952. The panel met for four days starting January 14, 1953.
Howard Percy Robertson presided.
If you have been reading along, his name has come up before. In May, when I walked through the SHAEF Air Technical Section file at the National Archives, one sentence near the bottom of a 1944 memo from Air Commodore C. M. Grierson read: Mr. Robertson has also been asked to consider the problem.
Around him sat Samuel Goudsmit, Luis Alvarez, Lloyd Berkner, and Thornton Page. Every man held active clearances. Every man had spent the war inside compartmented programs. The CIA pulled the senior bench of America’s classified scientific establishment.
Frederick Durant of CIA scientific intelligence sat as recorder. The unclassified summary he produced is on the public record. The operative language is in Tab A.
The headline conclusion has been quoted every time the Robertson Panel has been written about for the past seventy-three years.
The evidence presented on Unidentified Flying Objects shows no indication that these phenomena constitute a direct physical threat to national security.
It does not say the phenomena are not real. It says they are not a direct threat. The recommendation the panel actually wanted the agencies to act on is in the next paragraph.
We strongly recommend 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.
Strip the special status. Strip the aura.
Then the panel told them how.
The Panel’s concept of a broad educational program integrating efforts of all concerned agencies was that it should have two major aims: training and “debunking.”
The word debunking, in quotation marks, was written into a formal CIA-approved recommendation in January 1953. The panel put the marks there. They made debunking one of two named aims of an official federal program.
The plan ran through mass media, television, and motion pictures. The report named Walt Disney Inc. as a candidate producer of educational films, a suggestion made at the table by J. Allen Hynek himself.
And then this.
The Panel took cognizance of the existence of such groups as the “Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators” (Los Angeles) and the “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization” (Wisconsin). It was believed that such organizations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.
Two American civilian research groups, named on the page, marked for federal surveillance in a CIA-approved recommendation.
I spent eight years in the Navy as an Operations Specialist, four of them aboard USS Peleliu in Tactical Air Control Squadron 11. Internal truth and public messaging are not the same product in any serious military operation. You learn to keep them separate or you do not last on the watch.
The Robertson Panel did not touch the classified record. Chadwell’s defense-installation memo stayed in the CIA’s file. The Newhouse film stayed on the Navy’s books at unidentified. The panel was hired to design the public face. The investigation kept running underneath.
In December 1969, the Air Force closed Project Blue Book and announced the government was finished with UFOs. The FBI’s file on the same subject, 62-HQ-83894, had been open since 1947 and stayed open. In September 2023, an FBI agent at a restricted military range filed a UAP report on Form FD-302. The custody-control language at the bottom of that report was the same language printed at the bottom of FBI Special Agent D. Arthur Byrnes Jr.’s May 1964 Socorro memo.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 built the federal mechanism for permanent secrecy. Certain technical facts get classified automatically, beyond the reach of courts and Congress without specific authorization. The Robertson Panel showed that by 1953, the same mechanism was already being applied to UFOs.
AARO is the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Congress created it in the 2022 defense authorization and required it to release UAP case files to the public. AARO released its first one in May 2026. That was the first government UAP report in seventy-three years without the debunking frame the Robertson Panel designed.
Congress did not give AARO the authority to declassify what sits underneath. The Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Amendment would have. It cleared the Senate and was gutted in conference in 2023.
The Durant Report is on the public record. So are the September 1947 Twining memorandum, the May 2026 AARO case file, and the 2023 FD-302 from FBI file 62-HQ-83894. Read them tonight, side by side.
Tab A is still operative. The open question is what has been filed under it for seventy-three years, and who has been cleared to read it.
Stay sharp.
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