UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record
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In addition to the media, the panel recommended using psychologists, advertising experts, amateur astronomers, and even Disney cartoons to reduce enthusiasm and gullibility. “Business clubs, high schools, colleges, and television stations would all be pleased to cooperate in the showing of documentary type motion pictures if prepared in an interesting manner. The use of true cases showing first the ‘mystery’ and then the ‘explanation’ would be forceful.” Lastly, civilian groups studying UFOs should be “watched” due to their “great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur.”
In short, a group of scientists selected by the CIA advised our government to encourage all agencies within the intelligence community to influence mass media and infiltrate civilian research groups for the purpose of debunking UFOs. Media could then become a tool for covertly controlling public perception, a mouthpiece for government policy and propaganda, to “debunk,” or ridicule, UFOs. Public interest in UFO incidents was to be strongly discouraged and diminished through these tactics, and intelligence operatives could make sure that the facts were kept from leading researchers through disinformation. In the name of national security, the subject was fair game for the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. All of these recommendations were written in black and white by the CIA panel and then classified, and the public did not have access to the full report until 1975, when the explosive Robertson Panel Report was finally released in its entirety.
When the CIA convened its selected group of scientists in 1953, astronomer J. Allen Hynek had been working for a number of years as consultant to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Formerly director of Ohio State University’s McMillan Observatory and later chairman of the astronomy department and director of the Lindheimer Astronomical Research Center at Northwestern University, Dr. Hynek had been hired in 1948. He sat in on most of the Robertson Panel meetings and observed the predetermined agenda unfold, noting that the best UFO evidence was not given proper attention. “The implication in the Panel Report was that UFOs were a nonsense (non-science) matter, to be debunked at all costs,” Hynek revealed later. “It made the subject of UFOs scientifically unrespectable.”11
Project Blue Book had been set up as a repository for UFO cases and a place for people to call and file reports of sightings, but in reality it was an understaffed, amateurish public relations operation focused on explaining away UFO sightings, no matter how far-fetched the explanation. Throughout his career as popular public representative of Blue Book for the duration of its operation, Hynek was well aware of the integration of the “training and debunking” tactic within the Air Force program, but ironically, as one of the implementers of the Robertson Panel agenda, he was part of the problem himself.
Years later he admitted that “for nearly twenty years [of Project Blue Book, 1951–1970] not enough attention was paid to the subject to acquire the kind of data needed even to decide the nature of the UFO phenomenon.”12 Hynek was the only consistent presence at Blue Book and the sole scientist. The office was staffed mainly by an ever-changing stream of low-ranking officers with no particular training to prepare them for this line of work, and often little interest in it. Hynek brought some respectability to the Air Force project, though it was never equipped to solve the problem and official prejudice kept it that way.
Despite his eventual transformation after two decades of work with the Air Force, Hynek had earlier stretched logic to its limit in order to explain away as many UFO reports as possible. In his landmark 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, he acknowledged that debunking was what the Air Force expected of him. “The entire Blue Book operation was a foul-up based on the categorical premise that the incredible things reported could not possibly have any basis in fact,”13 he wrote. The Air Force, at least publicly, had dutifully fulfilled the debunking role that the CIA panel had so highly recommended, and Blue Book records are rife with examples of solid cases being given ridiculous, often infuriating explanations, sometimes by Hynek himself. Even as he became more aware of the contradiction in later years, Hynek said he did not want to fight with the military and felt it was more important that he maintain access to the store of data at Blue Book, “as poor as they were.”14
In this vein, perhaps most famous is his “swamp gas” statement, made in 1966. For two days, over a hundred witnesses in Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, had seen glowing unidentified objects at relatively low altitudes, many of them near swampy areas. This quickly became a highly charged national news story, and great pressure was placed on the Air Force to solve the case as quickly as possible. Hynek was called to a packed press conference, one bordering on hysteria, as he described it, where he made the comment that the lights could have been the glow of something called marsh gas, a rare phenomenon that arises from the spontaneous ignition of decaying vegetation. The hostility he faced in the press and among the public for his “swamp gas” explanation was widespread, and the media ridicule he received is now legendary. This time, everyone seemed to recognize that the Air Force had gone too far and crossed an unacceptable line in its debunking.
American frustration with the Air Force’s inability to adequately investigate and address recurring UFO sightings had been building, and many now began to feel that the Air Force was not only incompetent but actually intent on covering up the truth about UFOs. Two well-known figures of this era—Major Donald Kehoe of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a leading civilian research group, and Dr. James E. McDonald, a senior atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona—played critical roles in bringing credibility and knowledge to the UFO subject while challenging the approach of Project Blue Book. Following the publication of best-selling books and magazine cover stories about UFOs that year, public interest in the phenomenon was at its peak.
We will never know to what extent the recommendations of the Robertson Panel were directly implemented, but we do know that one of the Robertson panelists stepped up to the plate in 1966. Astrophysicist Thornton Page of Johns Hopkins University wrote to Frederick Durant, head of the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department—both men had been members of the Robertson Panel—claiming that he “helped organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel conclusions,” referring to the two-hour special “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” hosted by the trusted Walter Cronkite.15 The Cronkite show debunked UFOs from all angles with intense bias and false claims, such as statements that no radar or photographic evidence existed to support the physical reality of UFOs. It seems clear that someone must have been operating behind the scenes to justify such an extreme position. Ironically, Thornton Page himself made an appearance on the CBS special, defending the objectivity of the Robertson Panel evaluation and telling viewers that “we tried to evaluate all the reports without saying they’re ridiculous in advance.” Cronkite reported that the CIA panel found “no evidence of UFOs” and ended the broadcast by encouraging viewers to remember that “while fantasy improves science fiction, science is more served by fact.”16
Due to the outrage of his constituents following a series of sightings in his state, including the ones labeled “swamp gas,” Representative Gerald Ford, House Republican minority leader at the time, “in the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than thus far given by the Air Force,” called for congressional hearings on the subject of UFOs.17 Just before the Cronkite special, on April 5, 1966, the House Armed Services Committee heard from members of the Air Force, including consultant J. Allen Hynek, about the UFO problem, in which they considered recommendations for an independent scientific investigation outside of Project Blue Book. The Air Force took its first step away from the messy UFO business by agreeing to find a university willing to coordinate the study, one which would help the Air Force decide whether to continue its own program or disentangle itself from an unsatisfactory public relations campaign becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Late in 1966 it was decided
: The University of Colorado agreed to host a government-funded study of UFOs to be headed by Edward U. Condon, a well-known physicist and former head of the National Bureau of Standards. Although initial expectations were high for the project, and for a short time even added legitimacy to scientific scrutiny of UFOs, it gradually fell apart due to internal disputes among the study’s committee members. It soon became known that from the outset Condon had held strongly negative personal views about the subject and had never intended to proceed fairly or objectively. On top of that, conflict arose about whether the extraterrestrial hypothesis had any validity along with the many other theories under consideration. A crisis point was reached when two concerned project members unearthed a damaging August 9, 1966, memo by project coordinator Robert Low to two university deans. In it, Low had discussed the pros and cons of taking on the UFO research project, when it was still under discussion.
If the project were to be undertaken, he laid out the problem:
One has to approach it objectively. That is, one has to admit the possibility that such things as UFOs exist. It is not respectable to give serious consideration to such a possibility … one would have to go so far as to consider the possibility that saucers, if some of the observations are verified, behave according to a set of physical laws unknown to us. The simple act of admitting these possibilities just as possibilities puts us beyond the pale, and we would lose more in prestige in the scientific community than we could possibly gain by undertaking the investigation.
So, Low offered a way out:
Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by nonbelievers who, although they couldn’t possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective, but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.18
The specific language he used in his memo—particularly the word “trick”—helped give his game away. The term “flying saucer” was often used in conjunction with “believers” and “enthusiasts,” who assumed the objects were extraterrestrial and were (presumably) not using the scientific method to address the problem. Condon was infuriated that this was made public, and he fired the two staffers who had leaked the memo the day after he heard about it.
Although Low attempted to keep his own views secret, Condon had no problem making his negative attitudes toward his subject public. In a January 1967 lecture he remarked, “It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there’s nothing to it.” He added, “But I’m not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year.”19
In response to public concern about all of this, and in reaction to continuing dramatic UFO sightings, a second congressional hearing was called by the House Science and Astronautics Committee in July 1968. A host of scientists from outside the Air Force presented compelling papers on their own studies of UFOs; many of them had grave reservations about the effectiveness of the Condon study and advocated the continued study of UFOs despite its outcome. The testimony of Dr. James E. McDonald, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and a professor of meteorology at the University of Arizona, was the most extensive, providing a series of compelling UFO case reports. A respected authority and leader in the field of atmospheric physics, McDonald had written many highly technical papers for professional journals. Due to his personal interest, he spent two years examining formerly classified official file material and radar tracking data on UFOs, interviewing several hundred witnesses, and conducting in-depth case investigations on his own, details of which were provided to the committee.
McDonald testified that no other problem within their jurisdiction compared to this one. “The scientific community, not only in this country but throughout the world, has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance.” He indicated that he leaned toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation, due to “a process of elimination of other alternative hypotheses, not by arguments based on what I could call ‘irrefutable proof.’”20 Dr. Hynek recommended that a congressional UFO scientific board of inquiry set up a mechanism for the proper study of UFOs, “using all methods available to modern science,” and that international cooperation be sought through the United Nations.21
Extensive research has been done and books have been written on the tumultuous process which eventually produced the Condon committee report, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,” released in 1968. The approximately 1,000-page tome begins with the conclusions and recommendations by Condon himself. He declared that further scientific study of UFOs was unwarranted and recommended that the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book. Nothing should be done with UFO reports submitted to the federal government from then on, he believed. He wrote that no UFO has posed a national security or defense problem, and that there was no official secrecy concerning UFO reports. Condon’s two-page summary of the report, released to the press and public, actually contradicted the findings contained within the body of the volume, which most people did not bother to read.
In fact, Condon himself did not participate in the analysis of the carefully researched case studies that made up the bulk of the study, and it appears he also didn’t bother to read the finished product. The lengthy study did provide some excellent scientific analysis by other members of the committee, buried among many tedious case analyses of marginal importance which dragged on, page after page. Other key cases were left out altogether. Some reports actually verified the reality of still unsolved and highly perplexing UFO phenomena. For example, investigator William K. Hartman, astronomer from the University of Arizona, researched two extraordinary photographs from McMinnville, Oregon, and stated that “this is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within the sight of two witnesses.”22
Regardless, Condon’s summary stated, “Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past twenty years that has added to scientific knowledge.” And the National Academy of Sciences endorsed Condon’s recommendations. “A study of UFOs in general is not a promising way to expand scientific understanding of the phenomena,” it concluded seven weeks later.23 Condon added insult to injury by telling the New York Times that his investigation “was a bunch of damn nonsense,” and he was sorry he “got involved in such foolishness.”24
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) was among those registering objections after its panel spent over a year studying the actual 1,000-page text of the Condon report. The AIAA stated that Condon’s summary did not reflect the report’s conclusions but instead “discloses many of his [Condon’s] personal conclusions.” The AIAA scientists found no basis in the report for Condon’s determination that further studies had no scientific value, but declared instead that “a phenomenon with such a high ratio of unexplained cases (about 30% in the Report itself) should arouse sufficient curiosity to continue its study.”25
Behind Condon’s and Low’s disdain and closed minds, along with those of others in that camp, lay, once again, the problem of confronting the extraterrestrial hypothesis. As Hynek pointed out at the time, Condon and his supporters mistakenly equated the notion of UFOs with something extraterrestrial, believing that if UFOs were acknowledged as a genuine phenomenon, an implicit acceptance of the extraterrestrial hypothesis would ensue. This was clearly unacceptable to them. As Low pointed out in his memo, the simple act of admitting such a possibility was “beyond the pale,” and any professional doing so risked losing prestige within a scientific community not open to such a radical concept.
Even after twenty-two years of Air Force accumulation of data, along with independent studies made by various scientists such as McDonald, an overwhelming number of scientists and government officials still felt profound unease with entertaining even the remote possibility of such a hypothesis. That aversion was strong enough that its purveyors didn’t mind that it completely undermined the accuracy and effectiveness of an expensive, years-long scientific study on which so much depended, and which everyone knew would have a huge, historical impact.
Instead, the final nail was in the coffin. In December 1969, the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book—our government’s only official investigation of UFOs—effective the following month. From then on, scientists could justify their dismissal of UFOs by citing the conclusions of the Condon report. The government could refer to the Air Force decision to end its investigation to justify its disinterest in UFO cases. The media could enjoy the ride while making fun of UFOs or relegating them to science fiction. Now, no more direct action was required by those carrying out the mission of the Robertson Panel because the seeds had all been planted and the momentum would be self-generating for decades to come. The “golden age” of official investigations, congressional hearings, press conferences, independent scientific study, powerful citizen groups, best-selling books, and magazine cover stories had come to an end.
In the decades following, many dedicated researchers carried the torch and devoted their lives to documenting cases and adding to our knowledge of the phenomenon. Their capable and extensive work has been crucial in carrying us forward. But once an issue galvanizing concern on the national stage, the UFO question now shifted to the margins. The taboo against UFOs was fixed, and today, forty years later, that ban on taking UFOs seriously is thoroughly embedded in our society, like an efficiently metastasized cancer.