NICAP and Keyhoe
Inventor and antigravity researcher Thomas Townsend Brown established the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Washington, D.C., at the end of 1956. As NICAP struggled to get its financial footing, Donald Keyhoe, a retired U.S. Marines aviator with a strong inclination to accept the reality of UFOs, accepted a 1957 offer to lead the group.
Gordon Lore, a journalist who worked as NICAP’s assistant director, dedicated himself to well-documented, scientific investigation of UFO accounts.
Lore’s main responsibility was the coordination of some twenty-five investigating subcommittees across the United States, and in Canada, England, Australia, and elsewhere. NICAP mandated that the head of each subcommittee be a qualified scientist, and that subordinate members have UFO-investigatory experience. During the course of a typical investigation, witnesses were interviewed, and then asked to fill out a NICAP sighting report form standardized with a checklist and space for the witnesses’ narrative accounts.
Interviewers remained alert for witness descriptions of physical evidence, such as holes in the ground, burned areas, or other unusual marks. When accessible, physically altered areas were visited by investigators who, when possible, took soil and other samples. In a similar vein, unusual metallic or other objects were gathered for later study. Any objects or other evidence that had to be left in place were investigated later by scientists on the NICAP board of governors (James E. McDonald was one), or by those in a carefully assembled group of on-call alternates.
According to Gordon Lore, Keyhoe’s “opinion right off the bat was that there was real possibility that Earth was being scrutinized by alien beings from space, and that it was time for the scientific community to start sitting up and taking notice.” The considerable numbers of sightings near military installations and nuclear power plants suggested to Keyhoe (who used the term “UFO” in conversation, and never “flying saucer”) that the visitors had special interest in our arms and other technology. Keyhoe gave considerable importance to periodic rashes of UFO sightings, as happened in 1947, 1952, 1965, and 1973.
Keyhoe’s ET orientation hardly made him a lone voice; Lore recalled an (unnamed) Lockheed vice president who believed, as Keyhoe did, that extraterrestrials were engaged in observation of Earth.
