--- alias: - Battelle Memorial Institute - Battelle - BMI - Battelle Columbus Laboratories - Battelle Columbus - Project Bear - Project BEAR - Project Stork - Project White Stork category: Private Organization created: 2026-10-03 location: Columbus, Ohio relations: - end: 1954-12 fn: 5 role: scientific support contract for Project Grudge and Project Blue Book (Project Bear, later Stork), including the questionnaire and punch-card study published as Special Report No. 14 start: 1951-12 type: contractor_to with: '[[Air Technical Intelligence Center]]' - fn: 10 role: site of two sets of tests on a model of a Soviet-designed biological bomblet under the Agency's Clear Vision program, according to intelligence officials quoted by the New York Times type: contractor_to with: '[[Central Intelligence Agency]]' - fn: 9 role: operated the Hanford Laboratories (later Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) for the commission start: 1965-01-04 type: contractor_to with: '[[Atomic Energy Commission]]' - fn: 1 reverse: true role: institute created under the will of the Columbus industrialist Gordon Battelle start: 1925 type: founded with: '[[Gordon Battelle]]' summary: Columbus, Ohio contract research institute that held the Air Technical Intelligence Center's UFO support contract (Ruppelt's Project Bear, the Robertson Panel's Project Stork) from late 1951 and produced Blue Book Special Report No. 14. tags: - Organization - Private - ContractResearch - UFO - AtomicEnergy - Ohio - ATIC - ProjectBlueBook - Intelligence updated: 2026-10-03 --- The Battelle Memorial Institute is a nonprofit contract research organization at 505 King Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, next to Ohio State University, created under the will of the Columbus steel heir Gordon Battelle. The will was drawn in 1920, Gordon Battelle died in 1923, and the institute was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1925; its first laboratory opened in October 1929 with a staff of about thirty and its first director was the metallurgist Horace W. Gillett.[^1] Clyde E. Williams replaced Gillett in 1934 and resolved to make the institute's services more readily available to industry; in 1943 Battelle technologists began studying the fabrication of uranium for the [Manhattan Project](/programs/manhattan-project/).[^1] In the early 1950s the institute bought a large tract of land near Columbus and built the world's first privately owned nuclear research center, with a research reactor, a critical assembly facility and hot cells.[^1] The inventor Chester Carlson approached the institute in 1944, and through its subsidiary Battelle Development Corporation the institute agreed to help refine his dry copying process; a later relationship with the Haloid Company (afterward Xerox Corporation) ended in the early 1960s with an exchange of xerography patents for equity that by the early 1970s gave Battelle an investment portfolio valued above $225 million.[^1] ### The contract Ruppelt would not name Edward J. Ruppelt described the origin of the arrangement in 1956. After the reorganization of Project Grudge he wrote that no one on his staff could answer questions that would arise from UFO reports, so he decided to "set up a contract with some research organization who already had such people on their staff." The day after Christmas 1951 he and Colonel S. H. Kirkland of Colonel Dunn's staff left Dayton for a two-day conference with the organization. Ruppelt wrote that "Their organization cannot be identified by name because they are doing other highly secret work for the government," and called it "Project Bear." He described it as "a large, well-known research organization in the Midwest" with "several hundred engineers and scientists" ranging "from experts on soils to nuclear physicists," which had no staff astronomer or psychologist but agreed to obtain them on subcontract.[^2] Two studies were part of the arrangement: a study of how much a person could be expected to see and remember in a UFO sighting, ending in an interrogation form, and a statistical study of all UFO reports on [IBM](/organizations/ibm/) punch cards, with about a hundred items on each card.[^2] Ruppelt wrote that the questionnaire, which Project Bear developed over five months with psychologists from a midwestern university, was in use by June 1952, ran eight pages with sixty-eight questions "booby-trapped in a couple of places" as a cross-check on the observer, and that by the summer of 1952 three scientists were employed full time on Project Bear.[^2] The memorandum of the [Robertson Panel](/events/robertson-panel/), prepared for the [Central Intelligence Agency](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) after the panel's meetings of January 14 to 17, 1953, names the contractor. Its minutes for Thursday, January 15 record that "The Project STORK support at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, was described by Dr. Hynek" ([J. Allen Hynek](/people/j-allen-hynek/)), and its list of evidence presented includes "Progress Reports of Project STORK (code name for Battelle Memorial Institute contract work supporting ATIC)." In the online edition of Appendix U of the [Condon Committee](/events/condon-committee/) report published by the National Capital Area Skeptics, which marks deletions in the 1968 printing as restored in braces from a copy obtained from the Parascope site and checked against a National Archives copy, the words "Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus" and "code name for Battelle Memorial Institute" appear in braces.[^3] The same Condon appendix contains the [Air Force](/organizations/us-air-force/) regulation under which, from 1966, the [Foreign Technology Division](/organizations/foreign-technology-division/) was authorized to "Use other Government agencies, private industrial companies, and contractor personnel to assist in analyzing and evaluating UFO reports, as necessary."[^4] The [Department of Defense](/organizations/department-of-defense/)'s [All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office](/organizations/all-domain-anomaly-resolution-office/) (AARO) listed the arrangement in February 2024 as "Project BEAR (Late 1951 to Late 1954)": "an informal name given by Capt Ruppelt, Chief of Project GRUDGE, to a contract he created with the Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI) to provide scientific support," with technical support, a study of recall of interviewees, an improved debriefing questionnaire and a punch-card system. The report states that "BMI released a report under the cover of ATIC to maintain its anonymity," completed in late 1954 and titled "Special Report No. 14," and that it concluded it was "highly improbable" that the cases represented technology beyond "present day scientific knowledge." AARO's notes for the entry cite Hector Quintanilla's article in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence of Fall 1966.[^5] ### Special Report No. 14 The report is catalogued as Study No. 102-EL-55/2-79, Project No. 10073, dated May 5, 1955, titled "Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Aerial Objects," issued as [Blue Book](/programs/project-blue-book/) Special Report No. 14 of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at [Wright-Patterson Air Force Base](/places/wright-patterson-air-force-base/). The text, as scanned, does not name Battelle; it states that "a panel of consultants was formed, consisting of both experts within and outside ATIC," that it rests on "approximately 4,000 reports" of June 1947 to December 1952 reduced to IBM punched-card abstracts, and that the study was undertaken "to determine if 'flying saucers' represented technological developments not known to this country."[^6] The introduction quotes Hynek's definition of a flying saucer as "any aerial phenomenon or sighting that remains unexplained to the viewer at least long enough for him to write a report about it," citing his 1953 article in the Journal of the Optical Society of America.[^6] Its conclusions attribute the failure to identify most of the objects classified as unknown to "a combination of factors, principally the reported maneuvers of the objects and the unavailability of supplemental data such as aircraft flight plans or balloon-launching records." They state that "there was a complete lack of any valid evidence consisting of physical matter in any case of a reported unidentified aerial object," that the probability that the unknowns were "flying saucers" was "extremely small," and that "It can never be absolutely proven that 'flying saucers' do not exist."[^6] ### Project White Stork The arrangement outlasted Blue Book's early years. A memorandum of October 11, 1960 from the Chief of the Intelligence Production Faculty of the CIA's Intelligence School, in the Agency's CREST collection with the marking "USAF Declass/Release Instructions On File," reports a visit by a staff member (name withheld) to "the Air Force's Project White Stork (PWS) at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio." It states that White Stork "has assumed increasing importance to OSI analysts because it is able to provide considerably more assistance for many scientific and technical intelligence research tasks than any other repository in the Intelligence Community"; that information specialists with science degrees mark documents, answer reference queries and maintain a card file keyed to underlined "clue terms" including "personalities, institutes, and place names"; that the Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence was "considering providing funds to PWS"; and that at that time White Stork "concentrates on subjects of interest to the Air Force's Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Field, Dayton."[^7] A [State Department](/organizations/state-department/) memorandum of November 10, 1964 to the Foreign Area Research Coordination Group lists a second Battelle unit, the Remote Areas Conflict Information Center in Columbus, among research and analysis centers serving the military.[^8] ### Atomic Energy Commission and national laboratory work On January 4, 1965 the "key" to the Hanford Laboratories, first called the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, was officially transferred to Battelle, which operated it for the [Atomic Energy Commission](/organizations/atomic-energy-commission/); the laboratory became the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1995.[^9] In 1978 the Department of Energy selected Battelle to manage a program on commercial nuclear waste isolation, and in the 1960s and 1970s the institute was the subject of an [Internal Revenue Service](/organizations/internal-revenue-service/) tax dispute (settled for $47 million in taxes and loss of tax-free status) and of an Ohio Attorney General challenge to its reading of Gordon Battelle's will, settled in 1975 with a distribution of $80 million to other charities.[^1] ### Classified work The institute worked on rocket and missile propulsion during the [Second World War](/events/world-war-ii/) and on nuclear propulsion research that led to the submarine USS Nautilus in 1948.[^1] [The New York Times](/organizations/new-york-times/) reported on September 4, 2001 that the Central Intelligence Agency, in a program code-named Clear Vision that began in 1997, built and tested a model of a [Soviet](/places/soviet-union/)-designed biological bomblet, that "the agency conducted two sets of tests at Battelle, the military contractor," and that the [Defense Intelligence Agency](/organizations/defense-intelligence-agency/) had taken over a project to replicate a genetically altered anthrax strain, to be part of Project Jefferson, for which the West Jefferson, Ohio, laboratory of Battelle had been selected. A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant Commander James Brooks, declined comment and, asked about the precautions at Battelle, said security was "entirely suitable for all work already conducted and planned for Project Jefferson."[^10] [^1]: "Battelle Memorial Institute, Inc.," International Directory of Company Histories, Gale (entry reprinted at Reference for Business), https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/88/Battelle-Memorial-Institute-Inc.html (the entry gives 1920 for the will, 1923 for Gordon Battelle's death, 1925 for incorporation and October 1929 for the first laboratory; other histories give 1923 for the will and 1929 for the institute's beginning). [^2]: Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), chapters nine and ten, Project Gutenberg ebook 17346, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17346/pg17346.txt (passages on the meeting "the day after Christmas," "Project Bear," the interrogation form and the IBM file; the staff and questionnaire passages in chapter ten). [^3]: F. C. Durant, "Report of Meetings of the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects," Central Intelligence Agency, 16 February 1953, printed as Appendix U of the Condon Report, https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-u.htm (Part I, Thursday morning; Tab C, "Evidence Presented"; NCAS editors' note on restored deletions). Reading room copy: CIA-RDP79B00752A000300100010-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp79b00752a000300100010-4 [^4]: Air Force Regulation 80-17, 19 September 1966, paragraph 3d, Condon Report Appendix B, https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/appndx-b.htm [^5]: Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I, February 2024, "Project BEAR (Late 1951 to Late 1954)," with notes 23 to 25 citing Hector Quintanilla Jr., "The Investigation of UFOs," Studies in Intelligence 10, no. 4 (Fall 1966), pp. 95 to 110, https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF (read from the Wayback Machine raw copy, web.archive.org/web/2024id_/ plus that address). [^6]: Air Technical Intelligence Center, Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, "Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Aerial Objects," Study No. 102-EL-55/2-79, Project No. 10073, 5 May 1955, pp. vii to viii, 1 to 3 and 94, https://archive.org/details/ProjectBlueBookSpecialReport14 (OCR text read at /download/ProjectBlueBookSpecialReport14/pbbsr14_djvu.txt). [^7]: Chief, Intelligence Production Faculty, Intelligence School, Central Intelligence Agency, memorandum "Weekly Activities Report No. 36, 5-11 October 1960," 11 October 1960, CIA-RDP78-04836A000100040080-9, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp78-04836a000100040080-9 (the visitor's name is withheld under exemption 25X1A9A; "OSI" is the Office of Scientific Intelligence). [^8]: William J. Nagle, Chairman, Foreign Area Research Coordination Group, Department of State, memorandum "Foreign Area Research Notes," 10 November 1964, CIA-RDP66B00403R000300360003-8, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp66b00403r000300360003-8 [^9]: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, "Moments in Time," https://www.pnnl.gov/our-history/moments-in-time (transfer of the key on January 4, 1965; the 1995 renaming). [^10]: Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad, "U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits," The New York Times, September 4, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/world/us-germ-warfare-research-pushes-treaty-limits.html (read from the Wayback Machine copy).