Home / On the Record / Keyhoe 1958

• 22 January 1958Broadcast date
• CBS NetworkArmstrong Circle Theatre
• U.F.O.Episode: The Enigma of the Skies
• Microphone cutMid-sentence by producer Robert Costello

The Statement

The sentence Keyhoe spoke as he departed from the cleared script, completed after his microphone was cut.

For the last six months, we have been working with a Congressional committee investigating official secrecy about UFOs. If all the evidence we have given this committee is made public in open hearings, it will absolutely prove that the UFOs are real machines under intelligent control.

Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe (Ret.), CBS Armstrong Circle Theatre, 22 January 1958

The Witness

Donald Edward Keyhoe was 60 years old at the time of the broadcast. A 1919 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, commissioned in the Marine Corps, injured in a 1922 crash in Guam, he had retired from active service at the rank of major after a second tour during the Second World War. Before he became the public face of civilian UFO research, he had managed Charles Lindbergh's coast-to-coast tour in 1927 and written extensively for the pulp magazines of the 1930s. His January 1950 article in True magazine, "The Flying Saucers Are Real," sold roughly half a million copies as a book and is widely credited as the founding civilian-press text of the postwar UFO controversy.

By 1958 Keyhoe had been director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena for nearly two years. NICAP was the largest and most institutionally serious civilian UFO research organisation in the United States. Its board of directors included retired military officers and scientists whose credentials lent the organisation a credibility most contemporary flying-saucer clubs lacked. Membership would peak at approximately 15,000 in the mid-1960s. The fundamental NICAP position, established under Keyhoe's editorship of The UFO Investigator, was that the Air Force had decisively concluded the extraterrestrial origin of unidentified flying objects in the late 1940s and was actively suppressing that conclusion from the American public.

The Cut

The Armstrong Company sponsored the Armstrong Circle Theatre. The episode had been negotiated between Keyhoe, Tunick, and the United States Air Force, which insisted on script approval before the broadcast aired live. The passages cut from the original draft included Keyhoe's references to the 1948 top-secret Air Force document known as the "Estimate of the Situation," a Project Sign internal report that had reportedly concluded extraterrestrial origin and been ordered destroyed by Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg. Tunick had explained to Keyhoe in negotiation that "the Armstrong Company won't stand for an open battle with the Air Force." Keyhoe had accepted the cuts, then changed his mind on air.

From Keyhoe's own account in his 1960 book Flying Saucers: Top Secret: "For several minutes, I forced myself to read the lines on the teleprompter. But as the yellow strip slowly unreeled, all the frustration of the past three days suddenly boiled over. I stopped, looked straight into the camera." He spoke the line that the script had not contained. The producer Robert Costello had a lightning decision to make from the control room. Cut the broadcast off the air entirely, or silence Keyhoe and let the cameras run. Costello chose silence. The cameraman racked the teleprompter tape up and down in a frantic signal for Keyhoe to stop. Keyhoe finished the sentence. Edwards' microphone, in an adjacent shot, was still live. Viewers who turned up their television volume caught the closing words. The CBS switchboards lit up within minutes.

Aftermath

The New York Times covered the incident the following day under the headline "Author Digresses on TV; Sound Is Cut." Herbert A. Carlborg, CBS director of editing, told the press that "this program had been carefully cleared for security reasons." Keyhoe considered going to the press to protest the censorship but concluded that this would also damage Costello and Tunick, whom he believed had been victims of Air Force pressure rather than instigators. On 8 March 1958 he appeared on The Mike Wallace Interview on ABC and discussed the censorship at length, blaming the Air Force rather than CBS. The Mike Wallace interview is preserved in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The institutional consequences ran beyond Keyhoe. NICAP's congressional advocacy continued through the 1960s and culminated in the Raymond E. Fowler letter entered into the record at the 1966 House Armed Services Committee hearing, the first time a NICAP position was formally accepted into a US congressional record. Keyhoe remained NICAP director until December 1969, when he was forced to retire by the board following a period of financial difficulty. He continued writing through to his 1973 final book Aliens from Space. He died at his home in New Market, Virginia on 29 November 1988 at the age of 91.

Source and Provenance

From the Archive

• Keyhoe's line on the On the Record page
• The 1966 House Armed Services hearing where NICAP first entered the congressional record
• The Dedication, honouring Keyhoe among the independent UFO researchers
• Donald E. Keyhoe biography