General C. B. Cabell, director of Air Force intelligence, reactivated Project Grudge in 1951, putting Captain Ruppelt in charge. Ruppelt was fairly open minded, but even he had his limits. Although he was ready to take unidentified flying objects a little seriously, he had problems with reports of UFOs that landed. And there were quite a number of such accounts. Ruppelt later wrote that he and his team systematically eliminated such accounts from their reporting system (Vallee 1969b, p. 28).
The CIA was also interested in UFOs. On September 24, 1952, H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s assistant director for scientific intelligence, wrote a memo to CIA director Walter Smith about UFO publicity and the high rate of reports of UFO activity coming into the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. His main concern was public opinion: “The public concern with the phenomenon, which is reflected both in the United States press and in the pressure of inquiry upon the Air Force, indicates that a fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible. In this fact lies the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic” (Thompson 1993, p. 81). Chadwell feared that false reports of UFOs could distract the military from real observations of attacking Soviet bombers. He also feared that the mentality of the American public could be used by the enemies attempting to engage in psychological warfare against the United States.
In 1953, the CIA formed a panel to study the UFO phenomenon.
It came to be known as the Robertson panel, after Dr. H. P. Robertson, director of the weapons systems evaluation group for the Secretary of Defense. The Robertson panel included several prominent physicists. They decided that UFOs were not any real threat to national security, i.e. they were not machines from foreign powers or outer space. But they did say “that the continuous emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does . . . result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic” (Condon 1969, p. 519). The panel recommended that “the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired” (Condon
1969, pp. 519–520). The panel recommended a systematic program of debunking. “The ‘debunking’ aim would result in reduction in public interest in ‘flying saucers’ which today evokes a strong psychological reaction” (Condon 1969, pp. 915–916).
In 1953, in a development perhaps related to the Robertson panel’s conclusions, the U.S. Air Force enacted Air Force Regulation 200-2, restricting public reporting of military UFO sightings. “In response to local inquiries resulting from any UFO reported in the vicinity of an Air Force base, information may be released to the press or the general public by the commander of the Air Force base concerned only if it has been positively identified as a familiar or known object” (Thompson 1993, pp.
83–84). In other words, anything that could not be identified as a weather balloon, ordinary airplane, planet, or meteor would not be announced. The effect of this policy is that if there are observations of extraterrestrial UFOs, there will be no public reports about them coming from official military and governmental sources.
Air Force UFO reports did, however, continue to be collected by Project Grudge. In 1959, the name of the Air Force UFO research program was changed to Project Blue Book. In 1964, the nongovernmental National Investigating Committee on Aerial Phenomena published a report called the uFo evidence, which contained 92 UFO sightings by aircraft crews of the United States military. The sightings took place in the period 1944–1961. Of these cases, 44 involved U.S. planes being chased or buzzed by UFOs, U.S. aircraft chasing UFOs, or UFOs flying low over U.S. military bases (Hall 1964, pp. 19–22). In 1969, the Air Force stopped its official Project Blue Book UFO investigations. A summary and evaluation of the entire effort appeared in the Condon Report, which was released in that same year.
Although the Condon Report contained many detailed accounts of unexplained sightings, the report’s conclusion said “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge” and “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby” (Condon 1969, p. 1). In answer to the question what should be done with UFO reports that come to the government and military from the public, the report advised “nothing should be done with them in the expectation that they are going to contribute to the advance of science” (Condon 1969, p.
4). And finally, the authors said: “We strongly recommend that teachers refrain from giving students credit for school work based on their reading of the presently available UFO books and magazine articles. Teachers who find their students strongly motivated in this direction should attempt to channel their interests in the direction of serious study of astronomy and meteorology, and in the direction of critical analysis of fantastic propositions that are being supported by appeals to fallacious reasoning or false data” (Condon 1969, pp. 5–6).
Since this time, the official policy of the U.S. government and military has been to keep silent about the UFO phenomenon. Nevertheless, high government officials have reported UFO experiences and have sought to get government agencies to release information on UFOs. President Ronald Reagan, while governor of California, reported sighting a UFO while flying in a plane over southern California. In 1972, shortly after the incident, Reagan told Norman Miller, Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal: “We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens” (Burt 2000, p.
308). The pilot also recalled the incident, saying, “The UFO went from a normal cruise speed to a fantastic speed instantly. . . . the object definitely wasn’t another airplane. But we didn’t file a report on the object for a long time because they considered you a nut if you saw a UFO.” U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s science advisor wanted NASA to form a committee to conduct an inquiry on UFOs. NASA rejected the request because it feared ridicule (Henry 1988, p. 122).
Major foundations have shown interest in UFO research. Marie Galbraith, wife of Evan Griffin Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to France from 1981 to 1985, traveled around the world to get information about UFOs from scientists involved in UFO research. She and others then put together a report called unidentified Flying objects Briefing Document, the Best available evidence, which was distributed to high government officials in the United States. Galbraith’s work was supported by Laurence Rockefeller. She also helped organize a colloquium on the scientific evidence for UFOs, which took place in September 1997 at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund property at Pocantico, New York, again with the assistance of Laurence Rockefeller. The moderator of the meeting was Peter Sturrock, an astrophysicist (COMETA 1999, p. 51).