Two records of PURSUE Release 07 on one narrow question: which part of the United States Government should receive, identify, analyse and hold fragments of space vehicles that fall on United States territory or otherwise come into its possession. USG-UAP-D002 is a 72-page LBJ Library folder from the files of Charles E. Johnson of the National Security Council, whose withdrawal sheets name it Space Vehicle Fragments - Responsibilities and Procedures; EOP-UAP-D002 is a one-page memorandum of 29 May 1963. The war.gov site files the first under U.S. Government and the second under the Executive Office of the President, and pairs them.
The folder keeps the drafts of the National Aeronautics and Space Council as they changed from October 1962 to November 1963: a public statement, internal guidelines and a National Security Action Memorandum whose number is left blank. The first drafts designated NASA for the work, with fragments readily identifiable as from Defense launches going to the Department of Defense. In December 1962 the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence wrote that the matter had been placed before the United States Intelligence Board, and a Defense revision of March 1963 made the Department of Defense solely responsible for receiving and identifying its own fragments and had other agencies deliver to it, on a priority basis, any readily identifiable or suspected as foreign-launched; NASA asked for those additions to be deleted. NASA papers of 1963 and 1964 deal with public queries about launch fragments, among them a suggestion to give no more information than a query needs.
The memorandum, headed to Dr. Welsh and ending with the typed name R. W. Hale, sets down seven views of NASA’s Arnold W. Frutkin, among them that an Executive Order or White House statement “would scare people needlessly”, and that the Department of Defense and the Air Force wanted to use NASA for a “cover” but intended to let it do no more than return some pieces. Neither record shows a policy adopted; the folder’s withdrawal sheet lists four November 1963 drafts with no open note; and neither record mentions UFOs or unidentified objects. The war.gov descriptions of both go beyond the pages. Neither text layer, damaged or missing on many pages of the folder, names Project Moon Dust, the Air Force recovery programme for descended foreign space vehicles that this wiki covers separately.
Connections
PURSUE · National Aeronautics and Space Council · Central Intelligence Agency · Department of State · Project Moon Dust