Editing UFOs An International Scientific Problem (section)

== Matters of UFO History ==

Although I would probably be incorrect to assume that all CAST members
are thoroughly familiar with the history of the past twenty years of the UFO
problem, I do not choose to elaborate that history here in great detail. Much
of my own view of that history has been summarized in a form now available
elsewhere1. It appears to me that, following an initial flurry of official
USAF concern that American UFO observations of 1947 might be hostile aero-
nautical devices2, an era of puzzled investigation (generally devoid of solid
scientific talent) ensued in the period 1948-52, the era of USAF Project Sign
and Project Grudge. I have studied many of the 243 cases finally analyzed by
and reported by Project Grudge and can only say that, even in that earliest
phase of official investigation, it is startling to see how little scientific
insight was brought to bear on reports of a frequently very intriguing nature.

I have studied the final report of the Robertson Panel (in briefly
declassified status prior to the CIA's reclassifying it in the summer of 1966).
From repeated reexamination of the details of the UFO history and from personal
discussions with four of the persons present during the Robertson Panel's acti-
vities, I form the impression of a brief but futile attempt to look for some-
thing of interest, followed by CIA's request that the Air Force adopt a policy
of "debunking flying saucers" to "decrease public interest". After 1953, no
further vigorous Bluebook UFO investigation program ever reappeared. The UFO
problem went steadily downhill, its priority status at WPAFB steadily declined,
and in 1966, when I visited Bluebook three times, its staff consisted of a
major, a sergeant, and a secretary, plus a lieutenant then being broken in for
future investigative duty. The total amount of scientific talent visibly
focussed on UFOs via the staff and its consulting pool appeared to me to be
grossly out of proportion to the embarrassment being created for the Air Force
by a continuing series of absurd and scientifically outrageous "explanations"
of individual UFO reports.

For further insights and facts concerning the past twenty years' history
of UFO matters see Hall3, Stanton4, Young5. For information on many cases in
the Air Force files prior to about 1953, and for what appears to me (on the
basis of many independent checks) to be generally rather reliable history of

Air Force handling of the problem prior to 1953, see Ruppelt6. For the view-
points of a UFO investigator operating through those years, but outside of

In 1952, a brief year's energetic investigation (still not characterized
by strong scientific expertise, but definitely characterized by vigorous Air
Force checking and data-gathering in many striking cases) was the high-water
mark of the official American UFO studies. The year 1952 saw about 1500
reports turned into Project Bluebook, some 300 of which were conceded to be
Unidentifieds. When I visited Bluebook in 1966 for the first time, I was
quite astonished at the number of feet of files on 1952 cases - and much more
astonished to scan the contents of randomly sampled file-folders within that
year's shelfful. Case after case of, to me, entirely inexplicable cases, many
coming from within Air Force channels (pilots, controllers, ground crewmen,
etc.) told the story of the outstanding year in American UFO history.
The wave of 1952 reports drew strong press attention, above all after
Washington, D. C., became the site of two successive nights (July 19 and 26)
of radar-visual sightings of Unknowns. (These were explained away in a big
press conference on July 29 as due to anomalous radar propagation and optical
refraction anomalies. (See below.) By late 1952, intelligence organizations
became concerned over the UFO problem, evidently because of overloading of
reporting and investigative channels with the large numbers of reports being . fed to the Air Force by all sources. In January of 1953, the Robertson Panel,
assembled by the CIA, met and ruled that there was neither evidence of hostil-
ity nor evidence of scientific significance in all those reports (of which
that Panel reviewed, in its few days of activity, only about two dozen, and
even those not by any means the most startling or significant then in USAF
files). All of this I have discussed in enough detail previously1 that I
must gloss over many further points of great historical interest.

official channels, sec the several books of Keyhoe (7). When the full history of
the UFO problem is written, Keyhoe's efforts, from 1949 to the present, to get
the UFO problem out into the light of open scientific investigation, will, I
believe, be acknowledged as having been of great significance, despite the
slowness with which his efforts (and similar efforts of others) have borne
fruit. His role as Director of NICAP (National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena) has been seriously misunderstood by USAF personnel who,
failing to recognize the utter inadequacies of their own UFO investigations,
mistook his criticisms and his efforts to press for Congressional investiga-
tions as ill-conceived. I believe 'they were all too soundly conceived; but
they pressed against massive resistance based on what seem to be generally
honest misconceptions on the part of misinformed officials. Or so I see it at
present.

I elaborate these viewpoints here because I have devoted a good deal of
study in arriving at those viewpoints and because I believe that the misinfor-
mation generated within American information channels by the illusion that
Project Bluebook was a scientific operation has diffused outside our national
boundaries and has misled officials, scientists, and members of the public
throughout the world. International scientific progress on the UFO problem
will not begin until that misinformation is clearly recognized.

The alternative historical interpretation which holds that there has
existed a conspiracy to conceal the truth about the UFO problem, a conspiracy
sometimes painted-in on a canvas of international scale, does not square with
such facts as I have been able to glean. I am, to be sure, puzzled by the
sometimes startling similarity between "explanations" for UFOs emanating from
foreign official channels (often foreign air forces) and "explanations" of the
type so painfully familiar in USAF press releases following widely-publicized
UFO cases. But I ascribe this similarity to factors other than a highly
effective international conspiracy to which the USSR, the US, the UK, France,
Australia, Canada, and many other countries would have to be party! Stanton11
has some pithy remarks on the conspiracy theory. Young5, by contrast, does
feel there exists some American coverup at high levels; I would be prepared to
defend my alternative of the "grand foulup" hypothesis against every instance
he cites in defense of his "grand coverup" hypothesis. But I do not wish to
have that assurance equated to categorical rejection of the "grand coverup"
hypothesis. New facts or new interpretations of the many old facts I have
pondered could still change my views on this issue. I would reiterate a point
made earlier1: I suspect that some of those who have so long insisted the
conspiracy theory have not been in a position to recognize clearly how scien-
tifically inadequate the Bluebook work has been since 1953; they may have con-
fused incompetence with inscrutability.

Scientifically, what's sorely needed is a number of entirely fresh starts,
free from all pressures of governmental bodies that have taken an established
position. This may be better achieved in countries other than the United
States because of twenty years of Air Force assurances that there's really
nothing to all the talk about UFOs, nothing of any scientific or technological
significance. That view is dominant in Washington, in higher scientific
circles, and among most of the elder statesmen of science in the U. S. I can
speak with a good deal of authority on that point! Months of effort on my own
part to generate some new scientific UFO research on an adequate national
scale, with adequate science-agency support, seem to have generated only very

slight response. In Washington "everybody knows the UFOs are a lot of non-
sense"; and if they do admit to marginal doubt, they then insist on the pro-
priety of waiting for Condon's report from Colorado, due at the end of 1968

if plans go forward as now set. My own doubts about the propriety of "waiting
for Colorado" have recently been expressed elsewhere8, so need not be
reiterated here.