UFO, page 27
“Perhaps their lifespan is measured in centuries rather than years,” the diplomat replied. “Coming here could be as simple for them as going around the block is simple for us.”
* * *
Though McDonald was convinced that the military had largely decided to willingly disengage from the UFO discussion, the air force and government had, in fact, been working for months to find a university interested in partnering on the more in-depth study called for by the O’Brien committee. After Harvard, MIT, and the Universities of California and North Carolina all declined,II officials finally found the initiative a home at the University of Colorado, and—with some cajoling—a leader in Edward Condon, a renowned nuclear physicist and former head of the National Bureau of Standards. The creation of what would soon come to be known as the Condon Committee in October 1966 marked the third time in two decades that the government had assembled a team of scientists to evaluate the UFO question, and would prove to be a critical and fateful turning point in the Cold War chapter of flying saucers.
Condon, a former president of the national physics association, appeared to have both the scientific and political credentials for the controversial job. In 1929, he’d cowritten the first US textbook on quantum mechanics, been a veteran of World War II’s atomic race (where he’d helped isolate the uranium needed for bombs), and became a key figure in the public postwar debate over nuclear weapons, pushing for civilian control and international cooperation. His international ties had also brought him under suspicion with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a young and ambitious anti-Communist congressman named Richard Nixon, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, prompting multiple investigations into his security clearances—a 1948 HUAC report deemed him “one of the weakest links in our atomic security,”III but every inquiry cleared him, and in the midst of the controversy he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nonprofit that publishes the journal Science, a remarkable testament to his colleagues’ belief in him. A few years before he assumed the role of the new UFO committee chair, a Saturday Review profile described him as “a moral, impassioned man, with a depth of concern for mankind not common in scientists; a man fiercely principled and anti-diplomatic; a man who believes and feels in sharp contrasts, and who will let the world know his position without ambiguity. Fuzzimindedness is an anathema to him and he insists on saying so at every opportunity.”
Even though he wouldn’t participate in the project himself, Hynek celebrated the formation of the committee as a “personal triumph and vindication,” a sign that his personal fascination was truly worthy of serious scientific study. After decades, the questions of the saucer phenomenon would finally be put to real scientists, open to possibility, and with the time and staff needed to properly study the problem. The night of the committee’s announcement, he and his wife went out for drinks, and weeks later, as he had dinner with some of the newly chosen committee, he felt, almost for the first time, like he was among peers—people, he recalled, who didn’t look at him like he was a Martian himself.
As the committee started its work, Hynek laid out what he saw as the four possible explanations for UFOs in an independent, unsanctioned article for the Saturday Evening Post: First was the theory that the saucer reports were “utter nonsense, the result of hoaxes or hallucinations,” one he dismissed by saying that “enough evidence has piled up to shift the burden of proof to the critics who cry fraud.” Second was the possibility of “some kind of military weapon being tested in secret,” which he said was unlikely due to the sheer geographic reach and breadth of sightings. Third was the option that the UFOs really were from outer space, though he “agree[d] with the Air Force. There is no incontrovertible evidence, as far as I can see, to say that we have strange visitors,” until he noted, “it would be foolish to rule out the possibility absolutely.
“We all suffer from cosmic provincialism—the notion that we on this earth are somehow unique,” he continued. “Why should our sun be the only star in the universe to support intelligent life, when the number of stars is a 1 followed by twenty zeros?… Some skeptics who scoff at reported UFO sightings often ask why the ‘flying saucers’ don’t try to communicate with us. One answer might be, Why should they? We wouldn’t try to communicate with a new species of kangaroo we might find in Australia; we would just observe the animals.”
Finally, Hynek said, there was the possibility that “we are dealing with some kind of natural phenomenon that we as yet cannot explain or even conceive of.” In some ways, he explained, this seemed the most likely, especially given the revolutions of science that his generation had lived through already. “Think how our knowledge of the universe has changed in 100 years,” he said. “In 1866 we not only knew nothing about nuclear energy, we didn’t even know that the atom had a nucleus. Who would have dreamed 100 years ago that television would be invented? Who can say what startling facts we will learn about our world in the next 100 years?” As far as Hynek had come to believe, and as he now reiterated to Saturday Evening Post readers, the air force had continued to hide behind the fact that “most” UFO sightings turned out to have reasonable explanations—weather balloons, stars, or, as in Sagan’s case, ordinary high-flying airplanes—and just because it could explain “most” sightings, it didn’t equal the logical leap that the military or scientists could explain “all” of them. Sure, there was no “proof” of advanced, out-of-this-world technologies or extraterrestrial visitors, but there also remained some highly detailed and seemingly reliable sightings that were unsolved, the true unidentified flying objects.
Now Edward Condon had about $500,000 to determine which of the four made sense—money that would go not just to field interviews, research, and case file reviews, but to actual experiments, including the use of social psychology experiments on “rumor phenomena” (like the H. G. Wells War of the Worlds panic), and a test of Hynek’s own personal bête noire: swamp gas.
In mid-November 1966, Hynek and Vallée made their way to Boulder, renting a white sports car for the hour drive to the university from the Denver airport. Upon arrival, they spent nearly an entire day briefing the fifteen members of the committee—Hynek insisted on stopping the running tape recorder at various times to give a candid, off-the-record appraisal of the sorry lot of Blue Book officers—and as they did, Vallée was dismayed to note Condon nodding off to sleep after lunch.IV The next day, in a more informal session, the committee talked through its agenda and its goals, which soon turned into a lively and unproductive debate. (As they left, Hynek said to Vallée, “I think we’ve done all we could.”)
That fall, buoyed by some of the interest and attention shown during the committee sessions, as well as encouragement from Vallée and McDonald, Hynek decided to revisit some of his older cases with fresh eyes, “no longer assuming that the chances are strong that it’s all a lot of junk. I must take the viewpoint that after all these years,” he explained, “the data may be genuine, as poor as it is.’ ”V Such work, he felt, was crucial to the survival of the discipline at large.
In an article in Playboy about his new outlook, Hynek admitted his worst fear—after a bomber gap, a missile gap, and even Dr. Strangelove’s 1964 “mineshaft gap,” what if the US was about to experience “a UFO gap”? Although the global community had accumulated UFO reports and sightings from more than seventy countries, precisely zero came from behind the Iron Curtain, a fact that seemed logically inconceivable. So what was the Soviet Union doing with the UFO sightings that were surely occurring, but not making their way to the Western scientific community? What if the Soviets solved the UFO question first? “What little ‘hard’ information I have—and my intuition—tells me that the U.S.S.R. may have been studying UFOs with dispassionate thoroughness for years,” he wrote, whereas, he knew from personal experience, the US “is only now beginning to consider treating the problem seriously.” For all anyone knew, the West’s disinterest meant it was spiraling toward another Sputnik-like surprise. At best, Hynek warned, the Soviets could find “some previously unthought-of, unstartling explanation for unidentified flying objects; at worst, they could make first contact with an alien civilization conducting reconnaissance to our planet.”
To keep the United States in the race, Hynek encouraged the creation of a yearlong national study and a manned twenty-four-hour hotline, where people could dial UFO-1000 (this, of course, was in the era before the creation of area codes) that could immediately dispatch authorities, including local police pre-equipped with suitable cameras, to the scene of any sighting. He also advocated for the use of special UFO-tracking planes and helicopters, with trained technicians and scientists, on standby around the country—because events seemed to occur over days and weeks, they could be dispatched to “hot spots” at a moment’s notice and stay as long as necessary, capturing even more physical evidence, from videos to casts of indentations. “The expense is trivial if study of the best reports indicates that there is, indeed, valuable scientific pay dirt hidden in the UFO phenomenon,” he confidently argued. The results of such an effort in either direction would be meaningful. Either it would collect nothing of interest, thus allowing the country to more confidently “shru[g] it all off” as mass hysteria—or, he said, “mankind may be in for the greatest adventure since dawning human intelligence turned outward to contemplate the universe.”
* * *
If Edward Condon thought that battling J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee was inconvenient, he soon realized it was a walk in the park compared to adjudicating the UFO phenomenon and satisfying figures of all sides of the debate. Unlike the Robertson Panel or O’Brien Committee before it, the Condon members had little interest in going back over the “classic” cases of years past, figuring at this point that the witness reliability was questionable at best and recognizing that in almost all historical “unidentified” cases that the data would be insufficient for new determinations.
Instead, they focused on building their own investigative capability—identifying a network of civilian observers across the country, with help from NICAP and APRO, who could collect information, details, and statements about new sightings, using field kits that included cameras and tools to take “35mm photographs and 8mm motion pictures, check the spectrum of a light source, measure radioactivity, check magnetic characteristics, collect samples, measure distances and angles, and to tape-record interviews and sounds.” (By May 1967, such investigators would be capable of reaching any event in the country within twenty-four hours.) To help with the photographic data, the committee enlisted the CIA’s Photographic Interpretation Center to help with the photographic data—a fact it intended to leave out of its final report.
Controversy erupted almost immediately—first, over the proposed design of a standard questionnaire to collect sighting and witness data, a project started by the team’s psychologist, William Scott, that stretched to twenty-one pages, only one of which asked for information (the rest dealt with forensic examinations of the witness). Staff rebelled, deeming Scott more interested in disproving accounts than trying to find answers about the sightings. Shortly after, “he picked up his questionnaire and went home,” recalled committee staffer David Saunders.
It was a sign of the squabbles, big and small, still to come. Before long, the twelve-member staff had broken down into familiar factions—those open to the extraterrestrial hypothesis and those convinced the UFO question was primarily mundane misidentifications. Project coordinator Robert Low, who outside of the committee was an assistant dean in the UC grad school with a background in electrical engineering, was firmly in the latter camp—during a research trip to Europe to attend the 1967 International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague, he had passed up meeting with European UFO researchers and instead journeyed to Loch Ness, later explaining to his colleagues, in Saunders’s words, that the detour “was relevant to UFOs because neither one exists and it was important to see how they were studying something that does not exist.” Perhaps even more troubling than the apparent conflation of intelligent space life with a mythical swamp monster was the fact that Condon himself was regularly quoted in the press downplaying the endeavor; the day after his appointment as committee chair, he told reporters that there was “no evidence that there is advanced life on other planets” and that he would “need a lot of convincing” that saucers existed. In January 1967, he told another professional association, “It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business.”
As the committee’s research expanded—researchers traveled to the NORAD bunker in Cheyenne Mountain for a classified briefing on the nation’s air defenses, and to Ohio to visit Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Many committee staff began to understand just how little the air force would cooperate in the project; as he monitored sightings and reports, Saunders realized that Keyhoe’s civilian organization was compiling more detailed, more thorough materials, and doing it faster and more comprehensively across the country than the military branch had ever even attempted.
As the weeks went by, more trouble and tension began to permeate Hynek’s conversations and follow-up meetings with the Condon team, especially after he learned that Keyhoe and NICAP had apparently bad-mouthed rival APRO’s “eccentric” Coral and Jim Lorenzen so intensely to the committee that Condon was now refusing to have anything to do with the New Mexico ufologists, closing the committee off from APRO’s best-in-the-field records of witnesses and sightings. In July, unmitigated chaos erupted when an explosive memo penned by Robert Low came to light. The confidential internal document, which had been drafted before the University of Colorado and Condon had agreed to the UFO project, weighed the pros and cons of UFO investigation, as was standard, but also included a fateful sentence that infuriated some committee members: “The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but have an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.”
Saunders, floored by the comment, shared the memo with Keyhoe, who in turn told fellow UFO researcher James McDonald. McDonald confronted Low about his bias—leading Condon, furious about what he saw as an internal betrayal, to fire Saunders and the original staffer who had leaked the memo. In protest, other staff members quit.VI And, to make matters worse, the dysfunction was made public almost immediately in a Look magazine article authored by John Fuller. “Flying Saucer Fiasco” included a statement from Keyhoe that NICAP had withdrawn its cooperation with Condon’s committee. Soon Saunders, the original staffer Norman Levine, and Condon were trading accusations and threats of libel lawsuits in the press. The controversy eventually became so apparent that the journal Science, which had long eschewed the subject, began reporting its own article; Condon, the past president of the nonprofit that published the journal, resigned in protest over its publication. To Hynek’s dismay, the UFO effort was once again at a standstill.
I. “This man has many contacts, many ideas, and is afraid of nothing,” Vallée noted in his journal.
II. Northwestern University had actually been interested in hosting and Hynek had enlisted Lyle Boyd, Menzel’s regular skeptic coauthor to lead the project with him, but to Hynek’s frustration, the military rejected the Northwestern bid. The Pentagon decreed that it wanted a school that had no previous record on the issue, a view Hynek saw as “like opening a restaurant and looking for a chef who has not had any previous involvement with cooking.” In a meeting at the Pentagon that June, a frustrated Hynek told the air force that he felt like Moses—he’d achieved the promised land of the scientific study he’d spent years pushing for, but would not be allowed to enter it.
III. Condon responded, brusquely, “If it is true that I am one of the weakest links in atomic security that is very gratifying and the country can feel absolutely safe for I am completely reliable, loyal, conscientious and devoted to the interests of my country, as my whole life and career clearly reveal.”
IV. Project coordinator Robert Low later explained this was a common occurrence.
V. That December, a sympathetic profile in the Chicago Sun-Times of Hynek, titled “The Flying Saucer Man,” gave him credit for “challeng[ing] the vitality and flexibility of the American scientific establishment,” and credited him as the driving force behind the creation of the Condon Committee.
VI. Just three of the original twelve-member committee staff, including Low, ended up staying on for the entire two-year project.
26 The Condon Report
As the dysfunction of the Condon Committee spilled over into mainstream consciousness, members of Congress did something entirely unexpected—they intervened. On Monday, July 29, 1968, the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, led by Representative J. Edward Roush, convened what was meant to be a wide-ranging “symposium” on UFOs, bringing together a half-dozen serious in-person voices—including experts like Hynek, James McDonald, and Carl Sagan, as well as a social psychologist and a civil engineer—and prepared papers by a half dozen more, including Harvard’s skeptic-in-chief, Donald Menzel.I
The goal, Roush said, was a scientific discussion—criticism of the air force or the Condon Committee was out of bounds, as that was the purview of the Armed Services Committee. With more humility than normally appeared in such conversations, he added that the very subject of the hearing on unidentified flying objects was intended to be “a reminder to us of our ignorance on this subject and a challenge to acquire more knowledge thereof,” before quoting John Dewey’s maxim that “every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
To start, Hynek—introduced as a witness by his local Illinois congressman who served on the science committee, a young Republican named Donald Rumsfeld—told those assembled in the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building that “it would be difficult to find another subject which has claimed as much attention in the world press, in the conversation of people of all walks of life, and which has captured the imagination of so many over so long a period of time. The word UFO or flying saucer can be found in the languages and dictionaries of all civilized peoples.”
