The Condon Report
In 1966, as Washington readied to kick Blue Book to the curb, the Air Force invited University of Colorado physicist Edward Condon to investigate UFOs by enlisting other qualified people for the Colorado Project, which came to be known as the Condon Committee. What the government wished the committee to do (to the surprise of few close observers) was erase Blue Book’s many ambiguities and replace them with a group more in synch with USAF propaganda. In this regard, Edward Condon’s status as a UFO skeptic was hugely important. Privately, he felt the committee was pointless and without value. He used his position within the committee to repeatedly override the group’s conclusions, and urged professional punishment for trained scientists and researchers who engaged in UFO study.
One committee member, University of Colorado psychology professor David Saunders, pushed for an objective report, and encouraged NICAP to send over its most credible accounts, many of them from astronomers, engineers, pilots, and military personnel.
Condon chose U of Colorado graduate school assistant dean Robert Low to be project coordinator. Despite Low’s open mind (and his interest in the project’s potential for his career), the final Condon Committee report of 1968, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, declared that all UFO sightings are explainable in conventional terms. Of special significance is the report’s conclusion that further investigation of UFOs could provide nothing of scientific merit. Naturally enough, this conclusion aggravated serious UFOlogists (including Dr. James E. McDonald; see chapter one), and encouraged conspiracy theorists’ belief in government deception.
The report’s conclusion, that Blue Book be closed, gave the Air Force the imprimatur it had longed for. Subsequent UFO investigation could be handed to a new, more malleable body.
It is important to note that some UFOlogists feel that Condon and Low were dupes, led by the government to declare the pointlessness of UFO study —because the government knew UFO were real, and wished to deal with them secretly. In any case, the Condon Committee was the last Washington-funded UFO-study group of any significance.
On December 17, 1969, the Secretary of the Air Force announced that Project Blue Book had been shuttered. CIA personnel took charge of Blue Book files, and closed the office on January 30, 1970—virtually simultaneous with the CIA’s dissolution of NICAP.
The CIA handed Blue Book material to Edward Condon in 1973. The professor’s 1968 report had prepared Blue Book’s grave. Five years after that, Condon declared the UFO phenomenon a fraud or, in more nuanced cases, something based in hallucination.