Putting on the Brakes
Early in 1953, the Air Force and CIA worked with Dr. H. P. Robertson—a Caltech physics professor who did classified consulting for the defense department—to convene the Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs, a collection of scientists brought together to review existing UFO research, remark upon it, and recommend a future course for Project Blue Book. The panel (informally known as the Robertson Panel) was hurriedly assembled, and spent just four days, January 14–17, 1953, in review and discussion of Blue Book reports on a mere dozen sightings.
Because no evidence existed (according to the panel) to cast UFOs as threats to national security, Robertson and the others recommended that Blue Book activity be throttled back. Further, the UFO-related activity of military intelligence staff diverted resources from general intelligence work, compromising national security. Also, a continuation of high-profile UFO research might spark “hysterical mass behavior,” and threaten the general order.
The panel added that no evidence existed to support the notion that UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin. Politics remained, however, and true to the nation’s rapidly growing Cold War paranoia, the panel suggested that private UFO groups—such as Los Angeles-based Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators—be monitored for subversive activity.
Besides a cutback of Blue Book’s activities, the nation would be well served, the panel said, by a public-education campaign designed to discredit UFO witnesses and the whole idea of unidentified flying objects. To that end, valuable contributions could be made by schools, chambers of commerce, and local radio and television stations. A particularly ambitious campaign to undercut saucer claims, the panel suggested, might be undertaken by Hollywood, and movies so fantastic that audiences would laugh out loud. Well, small chance of that, as moviegoers had already accepted the UFO idea in The Flying Saucer (1950); The Thing from Another World (1951); The Man from Planet X (1951); The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); The War of the Worlds (1953); and It Came from Outer Space (1953).
At the close of 1953, what had been a Blue Book staff of about a dozen was reduced to Ruppelt and two others. Captain Ruppelt departed Blue Book in 1953; his successor, Capt. Charles Hardin, had virtually no interest in flying discs, odd lights, or the rest of the UFO phenomena. (And neither did the USAF, as witness the installation of consecutive captains—rather than majors or colonels—to head the project.) Hardin regarded Blue Book as a way station on his way to something better, so it served not only USAF interests but Hardin’s if Blue Book cut paperwork, cut back investigations, and kept a low profile. In a report dated May 5, 1955, Blue Book’s findings about earlier UFO cases were collated in “Project Blue Book Report No. 14,” and released the following October. Although the report (designated Project Stork) was based on USAF research, the document was prepared by the Battelle Memorial Institute, an outside firm with no grounding in what Blue Book had been pursuing in the Ruppelt days. At 315 pages and supported by 240 tables, Report No. 14 was a sober, pedestrian effort that noted no “marked patterns or trends” that might lend legitimacy to UFO sightings. A simplified summation was prepared for journalists (who were not to share it with the public). Late in 1956, a private researcher obtained congressional permission to publish the reports, minus the tables, at his own expense. The documents and other research that provided the report’s foundation were declassified in 1960 but not made available to the public until 1967, when interested parties were invited to view them at Wright- Patterson AFB.
Another Air Force captain, George Gregory, took over leadership of Blue Book in 1956. Like Hardin, he pursued a slowdown of Blue Book investigatory activity.
The Air Force, determined to make the press and public forget about peculiar objects in the sky, had failed to reckon with the Soviets. Russia’s October 4, 1957, launch of the 184-pound Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, was an embarrassing and worrisome blow to American prestige. What could be worse?