UFO, page 12
The so-called Merry-Go-Round and resulting national press attention arrived at a particularly inopportune time: that summer, the air force also launched a civil defense program known as “Operation Skywatch,” which sought to build a national network of 150,000 civilian volunteers who would watch for Soviet bombers at some 6,000 stations scattered across coastal and northern border states. “If an enemy should try to attack us,” President Truman explained upon announcement of the new initiative, “we will need every minute and every second of warning that our skywatchers can give us.”
Americans flocked to volunteer for the program, and proved eager—often too eager, it seemed—to spot suspicious objects in the sky. Within days of the first Ground Observer Corps shifts, which lasted twenty-four hours, reports of UFOs began to pour in; a Westfield, Maine, observer saw three disks, and a Coast Guard seaman in Nahant, Massachusetts, noted one circling his post. One volunteer in a remote mountain post reported an “unexpected multi-engine plane,” which led to the scrambling of fighter jets before it was quickly determined that the craft was none other than President Truman’s own plane, the Independence.
Between the Skywatch results and the public focus on the UFOs in DC, the nation felt poised for another interest wave. Normal air force intelligence, completely overwhelmed, all but ground to a halt, the New York Times reported, as more than five hundred UFO reports flooded in throughout the month of July. Sixteen-hour workdays became the norm for Ruppelt’s staff, who felt, given the volume of incoming information, like the country was constantly on the verge of a full-blown attack. To help alleviate the workload and pressure, the air force brought in two scientists, Richard Borden and Tirey Vickers, to map the sightings against meteorological phenomena. As they studied the weather maps and temperature records, it became clear that the visual sightings had probably been due to simple confusion, the radar sightings standard interference that typically came during humid-night temperature inversions, when warm air ends up on top of cold air—an almost nightly occurrence in DC during the summer. “The almost simultaneous appearance of the first moving targets with the [stationary] ground returns, [the latter] signifying the beginning of the temperature inversion, suggested that the target display was perhaps caused by some effects existing in or near the inversion layers,” they stated in their report. Moreover, they determined that there was little correlation, overlap, or relationship between the radar targets at each of the three facilities, or the visual sightings (save that one thirty-second overlap, which Borden and Vickers chalked up to coincidence).
Their conclusion—that the entire incident was a weird mix of weather and the power of suggestion—was backed up by November tests of a new radar system in Indianapolis that “spotted” similar UFOs. “Targets were larger, stronger, and more numerous than those observed by the writers during the Washington observations,” the scientists reported. “At times the clutter made it difficult to keep track of actual aircraft targets on the scope.”
By the end of the fall, Ruppelt himself was doubting the reality of the DC sighting flap. And, the more he looked into it, the more he realized that DC air traffic controllers and pilots seemed to spot a lot of UFOs—weeks earlier, on a night in May, they’d seen more than fifty of them on radar over the course of a few hours. While at first glance the “visual” sightings may have seemed harder to explain away, the more the Blue Book team interviewed witnesses, the less convincing their testimony seemed. One pilot’s recollection of “a falling star go[ing] from overhead to the north. A few minutes later another went in the same direction. They faded and went out within two seconds. The sky was full of stars, the Milky Way was bright, and I was surprised that we did not see more falling stars” seemed to Ruppelt to be a run-of-the-mill meteor shower. If he was going to make any progress, he was going to need more help, and a more expanded approach.
* * *
As the DC sightings and Skywatch reports clogged the air force’s intelligence pipeline, the Blue Book team turned to outside consultants to help make sense of the phenomena. The resulting effort, called Project Stork, was formed in early 1952 and focused on a contract with the Battelle Memorial Institute, a government research group based in Hynek’s hometown of Columbus who would use Battelle’s powerful and still-rare computers to sort and study UFO sightings. Battelle had had a long-standing Cold War contract with ATIC, primarily to study Soviet and Chinese military aircraft and capabilities, and Blue Book hoped their expertise could create a sophisticated statistical analysis of reported sightings, tracing the commonalities and highlighting differences across the hundreds and thousands of encounters listed in their files.
Stork, known internally as PPS-100, spent months working on their new mission, examining what Battelle called “a novel, airborne phenomenon, a manifestation that is not a part of or readily explainable by the fund of scientific knowledge known to be possessed by the Free World.” Their process required four people (two from ATIC, and two from a panel of outside consultants) to review the final identification of each sighting and label each “Known” or “Unknown”; about eight hundred were ultimately rejected as either too nebulous or containing too highly conflicting witness statements. The rest were coded and fed onto punch cards, for analysis by IBM computers, resulting in hundreds of pages of charts, bar graphs, and statistical analysis—everything from the angle of the sun to the reported colors to the latitude and longitude of the sightings. Ultimately, about four thousand reports were coded and analyzed, using a complex numbering system and a translation and standardization process, the final report dryly noted, that was “extremely difficult and time-consuming,” since the original sighting reports were not thorough enough for even a “quasi-scientific study.”
The resulting research found, effectively, almost nothing of interest. The sightings had no apparent trends or patterns, and Battelle concluded, “on the basis of this evaluation of the information, it is considered to be highly improbable that reports of unidentified aerial objects examined in this study represent observations of technological developments outside of the range of present-day scientific knowledge.”
Hynek, meanwhile, had been asked to track down what the air force might be missing. Over three weeks during the summer, he traveled throughout the US and Canada, meeting with astronomers at eight observatories, including the University of California’s Lick Observatory, near San Jose, and Mount Wilson Observatory, in Los Angeles, as well as a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in British Columbia, to ask them what they thought about UFOs. “Whenever possible, I brought up the subject in cocktail gatherings and in meetings,” he later recalled, and found, perhaps not surprisingly, that among his esteemed peers “hostility was rare” to the idea of flying saucers; many astronomers privately expressed more interest and openness about UFOs than they were willing to let on publicly. With some colleagues during his national tour, he dove even deeper, explaining the details of some suspected sightings and the unanswered questions that remained—conversations, he noted, that almost always caused fellow astronomers to become quite animated and interested. “Their general lethargy,” he would conclude, “is due to lack of information on the subject.”
A veteran of academia himself, Hynek understood the nuances behind the seemingly hot-and-cold response: “A scientist will confess in private to interest in a subject which is controversial or not scientifically acceptable but generally will not stand up and be counted when ‘in committee,’ ” he explained to his Blue Book colleagues upon his return. It was a fact of the environment in which they were working, and one they all had to seriously consider as their efforts continued.
There were still steps to be taken, but to Hynek, the Battelle study had been a significant milestone: UFOs were becoming the fad that never faded, proving it was a subject worthy of deeper study to be “weighed and considered, without rush, by entirely competent men,” since “the number of truly puzzling incidents is now impressive.” Contrary to his original expectations when he’d joined Project Sign as a consultant four years earlier, sightings had continued, and interest had sustained. “It appears, indeed,” he later wrote in his Blue Book report, “that the flying saucer along with the automobile is here to stay.”
I. In the back of the room, Ruppelt met for the first time the UFO-believer Donald Keyhoe, who was covering the press conference for his next book on UFOs. They shook hands, and Ruppelt explained that he’d been a fan of Keyhoe’s early aviation fiction short stories as a kid in Iowa.
10 The Robertson Panel
Once the mystery of the flying saucers arrived in Washington, it seemed impossible for the confounding question to be left only to the purview of the air force. If this was a Cold War trick or some secret Soviet operation, the nation’s intelligence leaders wanted to know—and the sooner, the better. The day of Ruppelt’s air force press conference about the “Merry-Go-Round,” the CIA’s head of scientific intelligence, Ralph Clark, wrote the agency’s deputy director to inform him that the CIA had decided to convene a “special study group” to review the flying saucer phenomenon. Throughout the month of August, various secret briefing papers and memos raced around the CIA offices and buildings in downtown DC. While the agency believed that the military had successfully identified the vast majority of UFO reports and sightings as explainable incidents, according to internal documents, “less than 100 reasonably credible reports remain[ed] ‘unexplainable’ ” and “so long as a series of reports remain[ed] ‘unexplainable’ (interplanetary aspects and alien origin not being thoroughly excluded from consideration), caution require[d] that intelligence continue[d] coverage of the subject.”
Out of the reports, CIA analysts created four major theories for UFO origin: (1) US secret weapon development; (2) Russian secret weapon development; (3) “the man from Mars—spaceships—interplanetary travelers”; and (4) user error, e.g., that all the “unexplained” sightings could be explained with better reporting and data. They then carefully began dismantling the first three categories. Via the agency’s own research team, analysts confirmed that the first option was not possible—after all, why would the air force demand national reporting on something it already knew about? Plus, the CIA wrote, there was the “unbelievable risk aspect of such flights in established airlanes.” It was unlikely that secret weapons would be tested where they were sure to be seen. The Soviet angle was similarly dismissed: “We have absolutely no intelligence of such a technological advance as would be indicated here in either design or energy source,” it was concluded, and “there seems to be no logical reason for the security risk which would be involved and there has been no indication of a reconnaissance pattern.” Geopolitics at the moment were just too fragile.
As for the theory of visitation, “Even though we might admit that intelligent life may exist elsewhere and that space travel is possible,” the briefing paper read, “there is no shred of evidence to support [aliens] at present.… There have been no astronomical observations in confirmation—no slightest indications of orbiting which would probably be necessary—and no tracking.”
In the end, the CIA agreed with the air force—UFOs were mostly the product of user error, not extraplanetary technology—but agreed that the concerns for national security and intelligence were very real, and very legitimate. At best, they caused confusion, but at worst, they could be turned into a key part of a psychological operation by the Soviet Union. Analysts and intelligence officers, in fact, had not seen a single news report about UFOs in the Soviet press, and concluded that there must have been an “official policy decision” to keep the phenomena from their public, while wreaking havoc on the United States’. Nervous that organizations on the ground could be seeking to cause exactly that kind of chaos, the air force began to closely monitor groups for UFO aficionados that had popped up around the country, including the Civilian Saucer Committee in California. “Air Force is watching this organization because of its power to touch off mass hysteria and panic,” the CIA wrote in mid-August. “Perhaps we, from an intelligence point of view, should watch for any indication of Russian efforts to capitalize upon this present American credulity.” It was also feared that public reports of UFOs might someday cause government officials to dismiss real sightings of incoming Soviet bombers. “We will run the increasing risk of false alerts and the even greater danger of tabbing the real as false,” the CIA warned.
* * *
Despite its public-facing authority, a trio of secret briefing papers and memos—documents declassified only in the 1970s—underscored that even behind closed doors, the US government remained just as puzzled about UFOs as the general population. That September, an overview of the agency’s ongoing efforts presented to CIA director Walter Bedell Smith came with a suggestion from the agency’s head of scientific intelligence that the CIA form a study group of its own to try to address both the scientific solutions to the “unexplainable sightings” and the real operational concerns about how the sightings, left unchecked, could disrupt or undermine US air defenses and enable a surprise attack. “I consider this problem to be of such importance,” the official, H. Marshall Chadwell, wrote, “that it should be brought to the attention of the National Security Council in order that a community-wide effort toward its solution may be initiated.” Smith agreed, and over the coming months, the CIA and the other US intelligence leaders, including the air force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the FBI, moved ahead with plans for a formal study that would mitigate public concern about UFOs. To lead the new effort, the CIA recruited Caltech physicist and mathematician Howard P. Robertson.
Beloved by colleagues and one of his field’s most respected pioneers, Robertson had been researching and publishing on quantum mechanics since the 1920s. In the middle of World War II, he’d been part of the National Defense Research Committee, where he’d been tasked with determining whether rumors of the V-1 were real (his work focused on what was obliquely called “enemy secret weapons”), and his involvement in the postwar interviews of Nazi engineers about the V-2 had earned him a presidential Medal for Merit in 1946. From 1950 to 1952, he had served as the head of the Pentagon’s prestigious Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, which sought “to provide rigorous, unprejudiced and independent analyses and evaluations of present and future weapons systems under probable future combat conditions—prepared by the ablest professional minds, military and civilian, and the most advanced analytical methods that can be brought to bear.”
The panel now under his purview consisted of a half-dozen science leaders, including physicist and radar expert Luis Alvarez (a future Nobel Prize winner), geophysicist Lloyd Berkner, nuclear expert Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, and Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Thornton Leigh Page. (Page later said he suspected he was chosen simply because he was an old friend of Robertson’s and lived in the DC area.) A CIA officer and a leading expert on missiles, Frederick Durant served as the panel’s secretary; J. Allen Hynek rounded out the team as an associate member.
For four days in January 1953, the panel convened at the National Academy of Sciences building near the National Mall in DC, for what was intended to be a comprehensive examination of about seventy-five cases that the air force had deemed the best and most effectively documented UFO sightings. Their collective mission was clear: debunk them and prove there was no such thing as UFOs. “H. P. Robertson told us in the first private (no outsiders) session that our job was to reduce public concern, and show that UFO reports could be explained by conventional reasoning,” Page later recalled. The pile of sightings was divvied up among the members according to their expertise. Alvarez took case histories involving radar or radar and visual sightings, while Page dove into reports of green fireball phenomena and nocturnal lights.
The panel’s research also consisted of watching two motion pictures—one from Tremonton, Utah, and one from Montana. The Tremonton film, taken by an experienced navy photographer, featured twelve bright objects in daytime crossing a blue sky that, after a thousand hours of frame-by-frame analysis, the men were told, the Navy Photographic Interpretation Center had determined were moving at close to the speed of sound. The Montana film, on the other hand, showed two lights moving far off, including passing at one point behind a water tower, a valuable reference point that helped show their distance and speed.
Supplementing those video sessions were briefings from Ruppelt on Project Blue Book, a report on Project Twinkle, the air force’s study of the green fireball phenomenon, and a meeting with air force technical intelligence chief William Garland, who spent about forty-five minutes telling them he thought “vigorous effort should be made to declassify as many of the reports as possible”I and that air force intelligence should dedicate more resources to the cause.
It also heard from air force major Dewey J. Fournet, who had held the UFO portfolio at the Pentagon for the preceding fifteen months before he’d left the service to return to private life. Fournet had started as a skeptic, but over the course of his tenure had come to consider UFOs more worthy of serious study. “In the normal intelligence tradition, I knew I lacked some key data upon which to base an evaluation,” he recalled, but it was possible, he now told the panel, that these were indeed extraterrestrials. He was far from confident, yes, but he just wasn’t sure what else the objects could be. For at least a certain subset of the sightings, he and the Blue Book team had ruled out all other known explanations—the objects were either aliens or something that humans couldn’t yet explain at all. To him, either answer was worthy of more intellectual study.
