The United States Navy’s photographic interpretation organisation at the Naval Receiving Station, Washington 25, D. C., abbreviated PIC in its own correspondence and a forerunner of the National Photographic Interpretation Center. It is the issuing office of PURSUE Release 05 record DOW-UAP-D098, the 1953 analysis of the Tremonton Film 1952 and the Great Falls Film 1950.
The work was done by the Center’s Photogrammetry Division, Evaluation Department, at the request of the U.S. Air Force routed through the Director of Naval Intelligence. Method: a stop-frame projector rigidly mounted at fixed distance from a ground-glass screen at 22x magnification for position plotting, and a Densichron Model 2150 densitometer for luminosity. Fourteen hand-drawn chart enclosures accompany the seven-page letter report of 4 May 1953, signed by L. W. Keith.
The report is unusual in the archive for how openly it states its own limits. Its central finding is expressly the majority opinion of the analysis group, with the minority view undescribed; its velocity and acceleration figures rest on an assumption of perpendicular motion the report calls a fallacy and a five-mile range it calls arbitrary; and it records that lack of proper equipment, money and personnel limited the investigation, suggesting obvious tests that could prove or disprove some of its findings. The spectrophotometric analysis the Air Force requested in February 1953 had not been done.
Connections
Tremonton Film 1952 · Great Falls Film 1950 · PURSUE · U.S. Navy · Project Blue Book · Robertson Panel