The Ugly Truth About UFOs - Blue Book & Beyond
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| Image courtesy flickr |
In August of 1953, Captain Ruppelt at Project blue Book asked to be
reassigned when his staff was reduced from ten to two. A paragraph from Wikipedia sums up the
prevailing attitude at the time.
Most who succeeded him as Blue Book director exhibited either
apathy or outright hostility to the subject of UFOs or were hampered by a lack
of funding and official support. UFO investigators often regard Ruppelt's brief
tenure at Blue Book as the high-water mark of public Air Force investigations
of UFOs, when UFO investigations were treated seriously and had support at high
levels. Thereafter,
Project Blue Book descended into a new "Dark Ages" from which many
UFO investigators argue it never emerged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book
Take, for example, the many mostly nighttime UFO reports from
the midwestern and southeastern United States in the summer of 1965: Witnesses
in Texas reported
"multicolored lights" and large aerial objects shaped like eggs or diamonds. The
Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported that Tinker Air Force Base (near Oklahoma
City) had tracked up to four UFOs simultaneously, and that several
of them had descended very rapidly: from about 22000 feet to about 4000 feet in
just a few seconds, an
action well beyond the capabilities of conventional aircraft of the era. John
Shockley, a meteorologist from Wichita,
Kansas, reported that, using the state Weather Bureau radar, he
tracked a number of odd aerial objects flying at altitudes between about 6000
and 9000 feet. These
and other reports received wide publicity.
Project Blue Book officially determined the
witnesses had mistaken Jupiter or
bright stars (such
as Rigel or Betelgeuse) for
something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book
What made the Air Force’s
claim ludicrous was the fact that Jupiter, Rigel and Betelgeuse were not even
visible in the night sky in Oklahoma at that time of the year. This obvious blunder caused one UFO
researcher to point out that, “The Air Force must have had its star finder
upside down.”
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| Image courtesy Pixabay |
In another highly publicized 1966 mass sighting in
Ohio, police officers from three different jurisdictions not only sighted a
disk-shaped silvery object that came as low as fifty feet above the ground but
gave chase. Less than a week later after
having interviewed only one of the police officers who had witnessed the UFO,
Major Quintanilla concluded that the officer had chased a communication
satellite. This conclusion was so poorly
received in Ohio that it caused Ohio Congressman Bill Stanton to announce, “The
Air Force has suffered a great loss of prestige in this community. Once people entrusted with the public welfare
no longer think the people can handle the truth, then the people will no longer
trust in the government.”
Despite this public tongue lashing from a sitting Congressman,
the beat went on at Blue Book for another three years. Criticism of Blue book became so pronounced
that in September 1968, Colonel Ray Sleeper of the USAF Foreign Technology
Division officially asked J. Allen Hynek for advice on improving the projects
scientific protocols. Hynek responded
with a list of eight recommendations, including broadening their staff,
revamping their analysis methodology, liaising with the scientific community,
and concentrating on only a handful of the best cases per month as opposed to
trying to investigate the 70 cases per month they were averaging. Despite being provided with clear
instructions that would have improved their results as well as their perception
to the public, none of Hynek’s suggestions was acted upon.
This was hardly the only congressional interest that
UFOs drew at the time. The same year as
the Portage county UFO chase in Ohio, a hearing on the matter was convened by
the House Armed Services Committee after a cluster of sightings was reported in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Following
this hearing, the Condon Committee was formed.
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| Image courtesy VideoBlocks.com |
Like the Robertson Panel, the Condon Committee was
composed of civilian science and technical experts. The difference with the committee was that it
was scheduled to last for a year as opposed to what amounted to an extended weekend
for its predecessor. Aside from
physicist Edward Condon who chaired the group, there was also physicist James
E. MacDonald, physicist Frederick Ayer, astronomer William K. Hartmann, electrical
engineer Norman Levine, chemist Roy Craig, psychologists, Michael Wertheimer,
Dan Culbertson, and James Wadsworth, as well as a gaggle of other scientists,
technical experts, consultants, and grad students that served on a part time
basis. Funded by the Air Force, the University
of Colorado, where Condon was a member of the faculty, agreed to host the study
on October 6,1966.
One month later, retired Marine Corps Major Donald
Keyhoe, himself a former naval aviator, as well as a renown UFO researcher,
agreed to share his files with the committee.
In 1956, Keyhoe cofounded NICAP, one of the most respected civilian UFO
reporting agencies of the era. He also
agreed to share his expertise in helping the committee collect, investigate and
analyze the reports that they would undoubtedly receive during the year. What should have been a dream team of
scientific luminaries and UFO experts quickly devolved into bureaucratic
bungling within the committee. It didn’t
help that two months after forming the committee that its chairman, Edward
Condon stated in a public lecture that the government shouldn’t study the UFO
phenomenon because he felt the subject was nonsense. He further added, “But I’m not supposed to
reach that conclusion for another year.”
The situation got so bad that one NICAP member resigned
in protest and a committee member confronted Condon to express his concern that
the chairman’s revelation would create a firestorm of negative publicity. Another committee member, physicist James E.
MacDonald, who himself came to believe in the validity of many of the sightings
the committee had been shown, was shocked to learn another committee member had
written a memo in July to university administrators reassuring them that, “they
could expect the study to demonstrate that the UFO sightings had no basis in
reality.” Regardless of the controversy,
other journalists as well as members of several UFO reporting agencies,
continued to forward sightings to the committee.
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| JFK memo courtesy wikimedia |
Soon, the media got wind of the memo, which was then
printed in its entirety. After that, two
committee members reported in an interview that they felt that Condon’s methods
were anything but scientific. They were
both soon fired after the interview was published in Scientific Research. The threats of suits and counter-suits did
nothing to enhance the committee’s public image. Nor did the May 1968 issue of Look Magazine
that described the Condon Committee as a “$500,000 trick.” After the release of the Look article,
Indiana Representative J. Edward Roush stated, “The article raised grave doubts about
the scientific profundity and objectivity of the project.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee
That didn’t stop the committee from publishing a
nearly 989-page report in January 1969.
As the US drew within seven months of landing a man on the Moon, the
opinion of the committee was that, “nothing
has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to
scientific knowledge”, and that “that
further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation
that science will be advanced thereby.” Condon also concluded that “government
agencies and private foundations ought to be willing to consider UFO research proposals...on
an open-minded, unprejudiced basis.”
You’ll note that the committee’s conclusion didn’t say
that UFO’s weren’t real. In fact, of the
56 case studies investigated during the committee’s tenure, including the
Lakenheath-Bentwaters incident that occurred over England in 1956 the official
consensus was that “the probability of
such seems low in this case and the probability that at least one genuine UFO
was involved appears to be fairly high."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakenheath-Bentwaters_incident
Even though Condon had gone out of his way to try to nullify
the committee’s findings even before their report had been issued, fully 30% of
the cases studied were still left without any plausible explanation. This is in contrast to the later statistics
of Project Blue Book where more than 12,000 UFO incidents were investigated and
701 were officially listed as “unidentified”, which is approximately 6%.
My new book details what happens when
a UFO crashes in the Louisiana swamp.
When it comes to the Condon Committee, one fact that
isn’t mentioned in the voluminous final report is the most telling of all. After the Condon Committee had broken up, one
of its members, physicist James E. MacDonald, testified before Congress in July
1968 that the UFO phenomenon was a valid scientific anomaly that deserved
further study. 4 of the other 5
scientists called to testify agreed with this assessment, the sole holdout
being Dr. Carl Sagan, who still remained skeptical.
McDonald’s conclusion was
unequivocal: "My own study of the UFO problem has convinced me that we
must rapidly escalate serious scientific attention to this extra- ordinarily intriguing
puzzle." – Carl Sagan
MacDonald went onto become one of the preeminent UFO
researchers in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
In his time, he went onto interview more than 500 UFO witnesses and
uncover important government documents relating to UFO’s. Interestingly, he was one of the few UFO
authorities that had his own encounter with the phenomenon. In 1954, while
driving through the Arizona desert with two colleagues, he spotted an anomalous
object. This spurred him into quietly
investigate other Arizona UFO reports.
Eventually, he would become one of the most popular and esteemed UFO
writers and lecturers of his era.
Next week I'll cover UFO's and the Space Race.
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