EOP-UAP-D002, Memorandum on Interagency Coordination for the Recovery of Foreign Materiel, May 1963

Executive Office of the President · 5/29/63 · Washington, D.C. · Document

EOP-UAP-D002, Memorandum on Interagency Coordination for the Recovery of Foreign Materiel, May 1963 is indexed as a Executive Office of the President record with incident date 5/29/63 and location Washington, D.C.. This document is an internal National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC) memorandum from staff member R.W. Hale to Executive Secretary Edward C. Welsh. NASC was a 1958 1973 body within the Executive Office of the President responsible at the time for coordinating U.S. space policy. The memorandum records a May 28, 1963, meeting with Arnold Frutkin, Director of International Programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), concerning the development of a coordinated interagency policy for recovering reentering U.S. and Soviet space debris and satellite fragments that might land on foreign soil. This memorandum is associated with a larger body of interagency correspondence included in this collection under the title USG-UAP-D002. The memorandum highlights an interagency policy debate over organizational jurisdiction during the early Space Race. It states that the Department of State and Department of War sought to leverage NASA s standing as a civilian scientific agency to help facilitate discreet recovery of sensitive space hardware while publicly returning non-sensitive components to the country of origin. As described in the memorandum, the proposed arrangement would have served several purposes: enabling access to adversary technologies, protecting U.S. technologies, preserving diplomatic goodwill, and obscuring the intelligence gathering dimension of technology recovery operations. The memorandum also presents Director Frutkin s reaction to the proposed arrangement as very negative.

Notable / anomalous element

• No clear anomaly-focused passage was found in the indexed text for this source; review the PDF/media manually if the title or metadata suggests a UAP connection.

Details

• WELSH Subject: Conference with Frutkin Fragments I saw Frutkin (and his assistant Marvin Robinson) for more than an hour in his office on May 28. (native PDF text, page 1)
• It was necessary to review the background and course of the meetings held last year because he was away at the time and now is very negative on the project. (native PDF text, page 1)
• No public announcement is now needed; 2. (native PDF text, page 1)
• An Executive Order or statement from the White House would scare people needlessly; 3. (native PDF text, page 1)
• The problem is overseas and State woul d like to be able to point to NASA as the U. (native PDF text, page 1)
• (and would like to have us pass Frutkin' s comments on the DOD paper to AEC (at staff levels for information); and 7. (native PDF text, page 1)
• Although NASA was drafting legislation, they (legal?) would oppose sending anything up to Congress in the foreseeable future because of the harmful debate it would touch off. (native PDF text, page 1)

Tags: Executive Office of the President, D.C., Space debris, NASA, Soviet Union