Project Blue Book

Air Force Eyes on the Skies
Following the first explosion of UFO sightings in the United States during the summer of 1947, the commander-in-chief of the newly independent United States Air Force asked Lt. General Nathan F. Twining to undertake a study of the strange objects zipping about in America's skies. On September 23, 1947, Twining sent in a preliminary report, in which he suggested the Air Force set up a permanent project to study UFOs. He also noted that a comprehensive search of captured German files on experimental aircraft yielded no clues as to the nature of the objects currently infesting American airspace. Twining's initial report also noted that the reported performance of UFOs exceeded that of any known aircraft -- "ours" or "theirs" (the Soviets').

On December 30, 1947, Major General L. C. Craigie, chief of Air Force Research and Development, approved a UFO study group. It was given the code-name Project Sign, and its security rating was "Restricted," the lowest secrecy classification used by the Defense Department.

147 reports were logged in Project Sign. All but twelve were explained. The case officers for Project Sign were impressed by the reports they were getting, and in 1948 a secret document called "Estimate of the Situation" was issued. The "EotS" conclusions were radical: some UFOs were real craft, and their point of origin was likely to be not on this planet.
Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg rejected the "EotS," saying that the evidence gathered did not support such a startling conclusion. Vandenberg's rejection ruined morale at Project Sign, and the case officers soon regressed to merely collecting and filing reports, and did very little investigative work. They felt they had done their best, and the brass had rejected it.

In the summer of 1949, a rash of "green fireball" sightings in New Mexico spurred a special study project, Project Twinkle. Because of the uniformity of the sightings (many people reported the same type of object) and the proximity of the reports to a highly sensitive nuclear facility (Los Alamos) and missile testing area (White Sands), there was some concern the fireballs might be reconnaissance devices of some kind. When the fireballs faded away, so did interest in studying them. The official conclusion ultimately was that the objects were simply a rash of oddly-colored meteors.

On February 11, 1949, Project Sign was reactivated as Project Grudge. The final Project Sign report (classified "secret") was an agreement to disagree. Some Air Force investigators openly embraced the idea that some UFOs were spacecraft from other worlds. Other Sign officers cited lack of evidence for such a conclusion -- including the lack of crashed UFOs or any other physical proof.
The Grudge team took a different path from Sign. They opted to try to explain every UFO report that came their way, no matter how fragmentary. This comprehensive approach set a problematic precedent for the later program Project Blue Book.

Journalist Sidney Shalett of the Saturday Evening Post wrote an article about the Air Force's study of "flying saucers" for the April 30, 1949 issue of the magazine. Since Grudge was a secret code-name, Shalett referred to the Air Force study as "Project Saucer." Shalett's article was the first printed, public use of the term "UFO," which was a simplification of the military contraction UFOB.

After just eight months, Project Grudge closed down. The final report of the Grudge team listed 273 UFO sightings, of which 23% were classed as "unidentified." There seemed little to learn from UFO reports, and Air Force interest waned through 1950 and well into 1951.

On September 11, 1951, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt took over the moribund Project Grudge. A month later, a revitalized effort, usually dubbed Grudge II, reorganized its reporting procedures, its forms, etc. The Battelle Memorial Institute, a "think-tank" consulting firm, was asked to undertake a statistical study of UFO reports collected so far. In March 1952 Grudge II went public as Project Blue Book, and for the next 17 years remained the Air Force's official UFO study program.
Blue Book's mission was significantly different from those of Sign and Grudge. In large part Blue Book's role was determined by a panel formed in late 1952 by the CIA. The "Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs," this group of scientists and academics is better known as the Robertson Panel. Finding no compelling evidence that UFOs were either extraterrestrial or a threat to the United States, the Robertson Panel nonetheless felt UFO reports were a potential danger to national security.

If the American people were uneasy about the safety and security of their skies, if it looked like unknown aircraft could penetrate U.S. airspace at will and withdraw without being intercepted or identified, then a climate of fear could develop that America's real, terrestrial enemies (the USSR) could exploit. Moreover, in the event of an aerial attack on the U.S., the lines of communication often clogged by UFO reports would be vitally necessary for national defense. It was these concerns that motivated the Robertson Panel to conclude that UFO phenomena should be downplayed for the public good. This is the unhappy role Project Blue Book had to play.

Some Blue Book leaders, like Captain Ruppelt, were genuinely interested in the UFO problem and made sincere efforts to solve the cases submitted to them. On many occasions, however, trite and easy explanations were trotted out to explain away sightings. When these explanations fell apart on closer scrutiny (as some did), it greatly undermined the public's faith in the honesty and intelligence of the Blue Book investigators.
As Donald Keyhoe of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and others sounded the drumbeat of cover-up and conspiracy, charging that the Air Force was keeping the truth about UFOs from the American public. Blue Book fed the controversy with its weak explanations and half-hearted debunking. People following the UFO debate were left with some uncomfortable choices: either the Blue Book investigators were not very smart, or were intellectually lazy, or else there was a government cover-up in progress.
The truth was nowhere so extreme. Despite the "X-Files"-ish nature of Blue Book, it was never meant to be anything more than a public relations desk. The regular staff of Blue Book at most times was one officer, a couple of sergeant-clerks, and some typists. Investigators from local airbases might be called upon to look into reports distant from Blue Book headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, but there was no large reservoir of field agents employed by the project. There was no official interest in (or funds budgeted for) such an elaborate operation. If Blue Book's work fell short, it was more likely due to lack of time, resources, initiative and expertise than to any covert agenda to cover-up the truth.
The great flap years of 1952 and 1957 were balanced by very sparse UFO reports from 1958 to 1964. Then for two years (1965-67), reports came in large numbers. Politicians, always eager to look responsive to their constituents, agitated for a better look at UFO reports than Blue Book was capable of (major pressure came from Congressman and future President Gerald Ford, whose home state of Michigan experienced a widely publicized flap in 1966). Congress appropriated a substantial sum, eventually topping $525,000, for a university-run study of UFOs. Several major institutions were approached -- Harvard, MIT, the University of North Carolina, the University of California -- and they all turned the project down. Eventually the University of Colorado accepted the task, and a new UFO study was launched under the leadership of noted physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon.
Despite pre-release sniping by pro-UFO critics, the "Condon Report" was completed in 1968. Though the report mentions a number of unexplained cases, its conclusions were no different from those of Project Grudge in 1949
"1. Evaluation of reports of unidentified flying objects constitute no direct threat to the United States.

2. Reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of:
a. A mild form of mass hysteria or 'war nerves.'
b. Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetrate a hoax or seek publicity.
c. Psychopathological persons.
d. Misidentification of various conventional objects."

Following the release of the Condon Report, Project Blue Book was slated for shutdown. The end of the Air Force's longest running UFO project was announced in March 1969, and made formal in December of that year by Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans, Jr., who stated: "The continuation of Project Blue Book cannot be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science."

While in operation, Project Blue Book received 12,618 UFO reports. Of these, 18% (701 cases) were catalogued as unidentified. Nearly half of these unsolved cases came from a single year, 1952, when the nation was swamped in the mightiest UFO flap yet experienced.

After the demise of Blue Book, the Air Force tried to wash its hands of the UFO issue. A recent Air Force fact sheet on UFOs states that "since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations by the Air Force." But the Pentagon has faced ever mounting questioning from a skeptical public and is periodically drawn back into the UFO debate. Almost three decades after the program ended, the questions raised by Project Blue Book have yet to find a satisfying answer.


Sources:

Peebles, Curtis, Watch the Skies! (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

Ruppelt, Edward J., The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday, 1956).

Steiger, Brad, Project Blue Book (Ballantine, 1976).



by Paul B. Thompson
Nebula Editor

Air Defense Command

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