CIA-UAP-014, British activity in the Field of "Unidentified Flying Objects"
A December 1952 Memo on the activities the British are taking to identify UFOs. The memo references a UFO sighting at an RAF field seen by high officials and RAF pilots. A more redacted version of the memo has been available on CIA's public website.
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Text of the document
Machine-extracted from the PDF war.gov published (its text layer or OCR), so expect errors, especially in names, numbers and handwriting; the PDF is the authoritative copy. Lines that did not extract as readable text are left out. Showing about 498 words from pages 1, 2 of 2.
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Approved for Release 2026 Under Section 1842 of the Nat ional Defense Authori zat ion Act for Fiscal Year 2024 security fnformatlon MEM0RANDtJM FOB RECORD Sl:'JBJEC'?: British Activity in the field 0f "Unidentified Flying Objects" l. On 15 December, the recem.tly arrived messenger from Britain reported the following. Re 1aa4 talked with R. V. Jones and 2. The British have be.4 a standjng committee created a.bout sixteen months ago on f'lyillg saucers. . Pre8'1Dlably this is now ud.er Dr. Jeaes through inheritance. The RAF are aetien peopl.e. The graup bas c~ncludea. that the observations are not eneiq aircraft and ~t none have been. over Brita.in. 3. The activity has been quiet and normal up to about tem. to twelve days ago, at wJaich time the Yorkshire incident took place. In some W' field, there was same sort of demenstratien to whieb. high official.a of the BAF in Lendon had been invited. During the show, a "perfect f~g saucer11 -~•seen by these officials as well..as BAF pilots. So.Dlal:lY peaple saw it tbat articles appeared in the pulic presa. Thi~ is disturbing te Jones because he rea1izes that the ·ereatisn of the e0rrection pablic opinion is a part of' his responsibilities. 4. Jones reminded us ef the SWedisb. incident (pres'QD18.bly he refers to the 013.e in 1946-)., and reminds us o'f a paper on the origin of' metearites -....__ ~: , the film vhich had been taken by the Naval non-commissioned officer (1'remonton incident). It is possibl.e that Jones. Will. write asking for a copy of'.the film or :further on the same subJect. . H. MABSHALI. ClWJWELL Distributien: / Scientific Intelligence
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While there is no indication that these objects represent a direct threat to the national defense, there are certain potential dangers which are related to these sightings. These are: 1. The difficulty and delay in positive 1dentification which could weaken the early warning system in alerting defense in the event of commencement of hostilities.* 2. The possibillty of mass hysteria whieh might be ~ posely induced by an enemy at a critical time by faked reports. 3. The possibillty that the emergency eonmnmications systems to command headquarters might be seriously overloaded at a critical time by such reports. It is believed that the problems of communications confusion and overload and the serious e:ff'ects of mass hysteria mist be dealt with outside the intelligence community, and 1t is planned to bring these matters to the attention of those agencies with whom the prime respon sibility appears to rest. With respect to ma.ss hysteria, it is believed this problem would lie with the Federal. Civil Defense .Administration and/ or the Interdepartmental. Cammittee on Internal Security. Accordingly, it is planned to bring this to the attention of the FCDA and ICIS through established channels. With respect to emergency eommm:deatiellS overload ing, it is believed that each of the individual Mil.itary Services should examine this problem. Accordingly, we intend to introduce the subject at a meeting of the Joint Communications and Electronics Cammittee.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of CIA's 23 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the CIA agency block it ranks #13 of 23 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #224 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (224 of 450 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
For the broader cluster context, this file is part of CIA UFO Files - the 23-file CIA cluster, from the 1953 Robertson Panel to the U-2 history and Cold War sightings. The cluster page walks through all 23 member files with regional grouping, sensor breakdown, and standout analysis.
Anomalousness Index: 58/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
No sensor, camera, or instrument backs this observation - it is testimony, relayed through the CIA, and scored on the rubric's lowest sensor-quality tier for that reason. That doesn't bear on the witness's credibility (a separate axis); it reflects only that nothing beyond human perception recorded the event.
The witness here is CIA personnel, entering the report into the federal investigative system through standard channels. That's one of the rubric's higher credibility tiers - trained federal investigative staff, weighted level with a trained aviator and below only an astronaut witness - though the posture is reactive (responding to a report) rather than an active operational context.
On corroboration, this file from the CIA - like every single-tier file in the PURSUE archive - is a single-witness or single-instrument capture per the released metadata. The rubric doesn't infer multi-witness confirmation the summaries don't actually establish; this score reflects the honest limit of what was released, not a judgment about the underlying event.
The released file contains no speed, acceleration, or vector data precise enough to score on the kinematic axis - and that's true archive-wide, not specific to this file. The rubric declines to infer kinematic anomaly from a witness's narrative estimate of how fast something moved; that itself says something about what PURSUE actually released: descriptive accounts, not flight-path telemetry.
Every file in the archive, including this one, scores this tier: a conventional explanation was considered in the released record but isn't treated as dispositive. That's a pattern in how war.gov's own summaries are written - they consistently hedge against strong conclusions either way - and the rubric takes that hedging at face value rather than resolving it for them.
This file was released as open by the CIA after a formal review process concluded - not simply logged and left pending. That's a stronger disposition signal than 'unresolved, no review': a review actually happened, and remaining open is the CIA's own published conclusion from it, not an absence of one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 58/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in CIA
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
ODNI-UAP-D001, USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official
CIA-UAP-002, Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Report, 1952-1953
CIA-UAP-003, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; The U-2 and OXCA…
CIA-UAP-004, CASE 17708 (CLOSED) and DR. Leon Davidson
CIA-UAP-005, German Scientist's Article on 'Flying Discs'
CIA-UAP-006, Sighting Of Unconventional Aircraft
Verification
SHA-256:
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