The Ugly Truth About UFOs - Part 2

Image courtesy flickr

Most UFO skeptics say that if beings from other worlds were visiting Earth, why don’t they simply land on the White House lawn.  While ET has yet to do the Hollywood treatment, they did the next best thing not once but twice in 1952. That’s right, on the evenings of July 20 and 27, 1952 numerous UFO’s were tracked on radar, seen by eyewitnesses on the ground and chased by fighter planes sent up to intercept them over Washington DC.  Both incidents were hard for the government to play down once the national press quickly got wind of the fact that UFO’s were buzzing the White House and the Capitol building.  

While what became known as the Washington Invasions were two of the most highly publicized incidents of the 1950’s, even by the end of the 1940’s the Air Force realized it could no longer sit idly by while hundreds of UFO reports piled up around them.  In 1948, they launched the first of a series of official military projects tasked with investigating UFO reports.  Called Project Sign, its small staff of field investigators gathered information, conducted on-site interviews and produced an estimate of the situation for their superiors.  

Instead of putting a lid on the UFO craze which was what the military brass had hoped for, the Air Force’s own findings threatened to blow the lid off it.  This went over about as well in the Pentagon as a lead B-47.  The powers that be were neither willing to accept the findings, nor were they  unconcerned about the ramifications should the report find its way to the press.  Fearing a public backlash, General George McDonald, who at the time was Air Force Director of Intelligence, conferred with his executive officer, Brigadier General George Schulgen.  The Directorate of Intelligence at that time had several divisions that oversaw the ongoing UFO investigation.  Housed at the Pentagon were three offices including the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence , the Office of Intelligence Requirements  and the Office of Air Intelligence .  The collection branch was headed by Colonel Robert Taylor and his right-hand man, Lt. Col. George Garrett.  Being privy to the bulk of material and interviews gleaned in the Project Sign investigation, they too were sympathetic to the idea that some of the phenomena were genuine, technologically superior objects not of this Earth. 

Image courtesy pinterest

That was not to say that everyone in the Air Force was satisfied with the interpretation of the evidence.  The Air Intelligence Office, headed by Col. E. H. Porter, reported consistently negative views concerning UFO analysis.  Porter and his adjutant, Major Aaron J. Boggs seemed particularly fond of spinning all reported UFOs as being of earthly origin no matter how well-documented the sighting.  This divisiveness within the halls of the Pentagon was hardly likely to end well for the investigation.  Add to this the decision by Air Force brass to switch from a policy of investigation to one of obfuscation and it came as no surprise that Project Sign was terminated in late 1948.  But not before reassigning or transferring the bulk of the staff assigned to conduct and analyze the initial evidence collected. https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sign/sign.htm 

Of course, that didn’t mean the Air Force was going to stop all investigations.  In February 1949 it started Project Grudge.  While the newly appointed staff was given the same latitude when it came to collecting data and interviewing military personnel who had encountered UFOs, their mandate was quite different than that given to Project Sign.  The marching orders of Project Grudge wasn’t so much to investigate the phenomenon as to debunk it.  The project operated on the premise that all UFO reports could be explained as conventional phenomenon.  Six months later, it issued a 600-page technical report. I included a link below to allow those who are interested to wade through the actual report.  But for the sake of brevity, let me point out that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  And boy did the report try to put the nail in the UFO coffin.  Page vi of the report sums up the conclusion like this:

1.      Evaluations of reports of unidentified flying objects to date demonstrate that these flying objects constitute no direct threat to the national security of the United States.

2.      Reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of:

a.       Misinterpretation of various conventional objects.

b.      A mild form of mass hysteria or “war nerves”.

c.       Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetrate a hoax or to seek publicity.

d.      Psychopathological persons.

3.      Planned release of unusual aerial objects coupled with the release of related psychological propaganda could cause mass hysteria. 

a.       Employment of these methods by an enemy would yield similar results.

http://www.nicap.org/grudge/grudge_dir.htm

Even more shocking was that on the very next page, the recommendations are that the investigation and study of reports of UFOs be reduced in scope and that the current collection directives related to UFOs be revised to provide for information clearly indicating realistic technical applications.

The last part of the conclusion makes me chuckle since the Air Force states that only misguided or misled observers along with hoaxers and loonies are responsible for all UFO sightings on one hand, only to seek to learn more about the advanced technical capabilities of the hoaxed or fabricated aerial vehicles on the other.  I wonder how Air Force pilots who had seen and photographed UFOs in flight thought about that one?  It’s hard to tell, since Project Grudge was shut down only three months after the report was completed.

Image courtesy flickr

If the government bureaucrats who were hoping to put a lid on the UFO phenomenon thought that would be the end of it, they were the ones who were sadly misguided.  While the Air Force's interest in the phenomenon was put on a back burner for the next few years,the Washington Invasions quickly reversed this edict.  

From Wikipedia: At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, 1952, a pilot and stewardess on a National Airlines flight into Washington observed some strange lights above their plane. Within minutes, both radar centers at National Airport, and the radar at Andrews AFB, were tracking more unknown objects.^[12] USAF master sergeant Charles E. Cummings visually observed the objects at Andrews, he later said that "these lights did not have the characteristics of shooting stars. There was [sic] no trails . . . they traveled faster than any shooting star I have ever seen.

Meanwhile, Albert M. Chop, the press spokesman for Project Blue Book, arrived at National Airport and, due to security concerns, denied several reporters' requests to photograph the radar screens. He then joined the radar center personnel.^[13] By this time (9:30 p.m.) the radar center was picking up unknown objects in every sector. At times the objects traveled slowly; at other times they reversed direction and moved across the radarscope at speeds calculated at up to 7,000 mph (11,250 km/h).^[14] At 11:30 p.m., two U.S. Air Force F-94 Starfire jet fighters from New Castle Air Force Base in Delaware arrived over Washington. Captain John McHugo, the flight leader, was vectored towards the radar blips but saw nothing, despite repeated attempts.^[15] However, his wingman, Lieutenant William Patterson, did see four white "glows" and chased them.^[3] He later said that "I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet. I was at my maximum speed...I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them."^[3] According to Albert Chop, when ground control asked Patterson "if he saw anything", Patterson replied "'I see them now and they're all around me. What should I do?'...And nobody answered, because we didn't know what to tell him."  

Image courtesy flickr

While it would take more than a couple paragraphs to sum up the concern that both the Air force, the CIA and the White House took over these incursions into restricted airspace over President Truman’s very head, a documented conversation took place on July 27 between the President with Captain Ruppelt and Captain James of the Air Force’s recently formed Project Blue Book.  While a transcript of the conversation is still classified, it should come as no surprise that several months later at the behest of the President and the CIA, the Robertson Panel was formed.

The panel first met on January 14, 1953.  Unlike Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book which were staffed by military personnel, the Robertson Panel was composed of civilian scientists, including physicists H.P. Robertson, Luis Alvarez, Lloyd Berkner and Samuel Goudsmit, astrophysicist Thornton Leigh Page, astronomer J. Allen Hynek and CIA case officer and missile expert Frederick Durant.  While ostensibly assembled to investigate the recent wave of east coast UFO reports, including the Washington Invasion, right from the start it was apparent that the results were already foreordained. 

During their initial meeting, which lasted some twelve hours, the panel was introduced to what Air Force Captain Ruppelt felt were the best 23 unexplained cases that had been investigated by Project Blue Book (out of a total of 2,331 Air Force UFO cases that had been investigated to date).  The evidence included two 16mm movies, one of which was shot by US Navy photographer Chief Warrant Officer Delbert Newhouse.  Two Navy photographic analysts who had previously examined both films stated that the objects depicted weren’t any known aircraft, bird, balloon or weather phenomenon. 

Project Blue Book staff courtesy wikimedia

On the second and third day, Captain Ruppelt and Air Force Major Dewey Fournet presented the
remainder of the unexplained cases to the panel, along with their opinion that some of the cases investigated by Blue Book were in all likelihood examples of extraterrestrial incursions.  The remainder of the third day was spent by the panel in discussing the case material they had been shown, as well as drafting their final report.

Incredibly, their conclusion was that “there wasn’t any evidence that related the objects sighted to space travelers.”  Even after Major Fournet, who was an aeronautical engineer and air intelligence officer, eliminated all other possible causes of the sightings, the panel rejected the notion that any of the strange craft were of extraterrestrial origin.  Although the panel had only spent a scant thirty hours reviewing material that had been exhaustively researched by the military for over 1,000 man-hours, the panel could not or would not accept the conclusions that the military analysts had.

In an interesting sidebar, after the panel disbanded, Astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek would continue to work as the government’s chief debunker for many years, only to have a sudden change of heart years later.  Initially considering the entire field of UFO study absurd, he later wrote five books related to UFOs and he issued a statement at the United Nations that urged the creation of a centralized UFO reporting authority.  When the UN failed to take him up on his recommendation, he started his own reporting agency, the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies which exists to this day.  Considering that by the Bicentennial, Hynek had been privy to literally thousands of sighting reports, this about face is nothing less than astonishing.  

Just because the Robertson Panel folded up its tent after rendering its conclusion, that didn’t stop yet more sightings from coming in. By the time Project Blue Book officially ended in 1969, it had amassed 12,618 UFO reports.  While many were officially deemed as misidentification of conventional aircraft, weather phenomena, reports of then top-secret military craft or heavenly bodies such as planets, fully 7% were still officially labeled as “unexplained”.  Even though all the reports were archived and many have become available under the Freedom of Information Act, it’s curious to note that all names of witnesses and military personnel involved with the investigations have been redacted. This includes the sightings that were explained as well as those that to this day are labelled as unexplained.

Why would every scrap of information that could be used to verify or investigate sightings be withheld if the Air Force had finished with its inquiries?  Why was anybody who was in on the official Air Force investigation that espoused the opinion that some of the unexplained sightings were the work of extraterrestrials either harassed or reassigned, while those that felt UFOs were nonsense got promoted?  Why indeed?

Next week I'll cover Beyond Blue Book which will include the Condon Committee and NICAP.

If you like what you see, don't forget to subscribe.  You can also see more of my work at http://authorcarlaustin.com/