On 18 December 1952, H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, wrote a memorandum for record. He had just received a briefing from a messenger who had spoken with R.V. Jones, one of the most distinguished intelligence scientists in British history. Jones had led MI6’s scientific intelligence section during the war, running the electronic countermeasures campaign known as the “Battle of the Beams.” By 1952 he was overseeing a British standing committee on flying saucers, created about sixteen months earlier, with the RAF handling the operational side.
Jones had a problem. Ten to twelve days before the messenger’s visit, at a demonstration in Yorkshire to which senior RAF officials from London had been invited, a “perfect flying saucer” had been observed by those officials and by RAF pilots. So many people saw it that the story reached the press. Jones was disturbed because, as the memorandum records, “he realizes that the creation or correction of public opinion is a part of his responsibilities.”
Attached to Chadwell’s memorandum was a briefing paper listing three dangers that UFO reports posed to national security. First, the difficulty of positive identification could weaken the early warning system. Second, mass hysteria might be deliberately induced by an enemy through faked reports. Third, emergency communications could be overloaded at a critical time. These were not hypothetical concerns. They were the articulated fears of a senior CIA official four weeks before he helped convene a panel of scientists to address them.
The panel met in Washington from 14 to 17 January 1953. Chaired by physicist H.P. Robertson of the California Institute of Technology, it included Luis Alvarez, Lloyd Berkner, Samuel Goudsmit, and Thornton Page. J. Allen Hynek attended as an associate member. They reviewed seventy-five case histories, the Tremonton and Great Falls films, and the preliminary results of a statistical analysis being prepared by the Battelle Memorial Institute. After four days, they signed a two-page report.
The report concluded that UFOs posed no direct physical threat to national security. But it warned that the continued emphasis on reporting “does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.” The panel recommended that national security agencies “strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.” It proposed a public education programme of “training and debunking” using television, motion pictures, and popular articles. It suggested Walt Disney and the Jam Handy Company as potential vehicles. It recommended that civilian UFO groups be watched “because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking” and their “possible use for subversive purposes.” The programme, the panel estimated, would require one and a half to two years.
Eleven months later, on 17 December 1953, Todos M. Odarenko, the chief of the Physics and Electronics Division who managed the CIA’s UFO portfolio, wrote a status report. The results were already visible. Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s investigation at Wright-Patterson, was now staffed by one officer, one airman, and a secretary. ATIC no longer conducted field investigations. Ten percent of reported sightings remained unsolved, but the overall volume had dropped. The panel’s debunking programme appeared to be working.
Odarenko noted a risk. Two recent books, Donald Keyhoe’s “Flying Saucers From Outer Space” and the Adamski-Leslie “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” were using declassified Air Force reports to argue for extraterrestrial origin. The Adamski book, Odarenko wrote, was “so nonsensical and obviously fraudulent that it may actually help calm down public reaction.” But both books, he warned, “illustrate the risk taken by the present policy.” There were “no other as yet apparent results of these recommendations.”
The policy held. By January 1958, its operational face was visible in a one-page memorandum from the CIA’s Chicago Office about a Los Alamos chemical engineer named Dr. Leon Davidson. Davidson had been pressing the Agency about a signal he believed was connected to a UFO sighting, asking for records on a specific transmitter. The CIA told him the records had been “destroyed by the originating agency.” The officer who wrote the memorandum was candid about the situation: “there have been many cooks in the kitchen on this dish,” he wrote, and the evasive answer they had been instructed to give “was the only one possible if we were to avoid crossing up previous statements by our own, and other involved agencies, to this man.” Then he added: “But the answer was hardly fair to Davidson, and was not likely to be fully accepted by him.”
The debunking programme’s most consequential effect, however, was not on the public but on the scientific community. In the spring of 1967, a US astrophysicist toured six Soviet astronomical observatories over the course of a month, assessing Soviet scientific attitudes toward UFOs. At Pulkovo Observatory in Leningrad, Nikolai Kozyrev, a Gulag survivor who had been among the first to observe volcanic activity on the Moon, said he “readily accepts their reality” and believed UFOs may originate on Venus. He had read Donald Menzel’s debunking book, which had been translated into Russian, and rejected its conclusions. At the Astrophysical Institute in Alma Ata, Director G.M. Idlis initially dismissed the subject based on Menzel’s book, but when presented with James McDonald’s critical research, he “readily conceded” it was “clearly still an open question.”
The US scientist’s concluding assessment was precise. “The general feeling one gets is that no official treatment of the UFO problem has been given in the USSR. Instead people refer to the US work, principally Menzel’s book, to demonstrate the absence of real scientific problems.” But then: “A demonstration of the inadequacy of US Official explanations coupled with some proof of the reality of the observations might excite enthusiasm more rapidly among Soviet astronomers than among their US counterparts who are more strongly influenced by the official ridicule associated with UFO’s in the US.”
The Robertson Panel’s programme had suppressed American scientific curiosity about the phenomenon more effectively than Soviet censorship had suppressed Soviet curiosity. The debunking worked. It worked on the people it was least intended for.
An Australian Department of Defence paper, written around 1970 and found in CIA holdings, articulated what the American documents could not. It traced the entire institutional arc: Project Sign’s interplanetary hypothesis rejected, Project Grudge’s deliberate suppression, the Robertson Panel’s debunking strategy, Blue Book’s reduction to a skeleton staff, the transfer of real investigative authority to the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron, and the Condon Committee’s predetermined conclusion. The Australian analyst, writing from outside the American system, identified the statistical evidence the American system had buried. Using Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14’s own data, the Australian paper showed that the percentage of sightings classified as “unknown” increased as the reliability of the observer improved. The best observers produced the most unknowns, not the fewest.
The Australian recommendation was measured and direct: “If Australia is to follow the U.S. lead, instead of following the public USAF attitude, it would be preferable to follow the USAF/CIA role of concentrating on gaining a knowledge of the power sources involved. However, it may be preferable to act independently of the U.S. and initiate a programme that is scientifically sound and intellectually honest towards unravelling the UFO mystery.”
Scientifically sound and intellectually honest. The phrase carries the weight of everything that preceded it.
