Project Blue Book

Project Blue Book was the name of the U.S. Air Force program for receiving, investigating and cataloging reports of unidentified flying objects, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. It followed Project Sign (1947 to 1949) and Project Grudge (1949 to 1951 and after), and on 17 December 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced its termination. An Air Force fact sheet gives 12,618 sightings reported to the project from 1947 to 1969, of which 701 remained "Unidentified."¹

Predecessors: Sign and Grudge

A letter of 23 September 1947 from Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, commanding the Air Materiel Command, to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, addressed to the attention of Brigadier General George Schulgen, gave the Command's "considered opinion" that "the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious," that some objects were controlled "manually, automatically or remotely," and that "due consideration must be given" to the possibility that the objects were "of domestic origin" and "the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this Command," and to a foreign nation having "a form of propulsion possibly nuclear." It recommended a directive assigning a priority, security classification and code name, with the data made available to the Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, the JRDB, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the RAND and NEPA projects. A directive of 30 December 1947 from Major General L. C. Craigie, Director of Research and Development, assigned the work to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field as Project Sign, priority 2A, security classification "restricted," to "collect, collate, evaluate and distribute to interested government agencies and contractors all information concerning sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere which can be construed to be of concern to the national security."² The Air Technical Intelligence Center carried the work. The final Sign report, Technical Report F-TR-2274-IA of February 1949, was classified Secret and declassified twelve years later; its appendices included a memorandum by George Valley of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and a letter from James E. Lipp of the RAND Corporation to Brigadier General Donald Putt on the extraterrestrial hypothesis.³

The University of Colorado's Condon Report recorded unconfirmed reports that in July 1948 the Sign staff prepared a classified "Estimate of the Situation" for Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg asserting that the objects were interplanetary, and that Vandenberg declined to accept it and copies were destroyed. Its authors wrote that they had "not been able to verify the existence of such a report" and accepted "the more reasonable explanation that the evidence presented was then, as now, inadequate."³ The same chapter records that Ruppelt in 1952, with Hynek's assistance, restudied the 1948 death of Captain Thomas Mantell, and that Ruppelt's later study led him to believe that Mantell chased one of the 100-foot "skyhook" balloons then secretly flown by the Navy, whose existence "was not known to most Air Force pilots."³

The project was renamed Grudge on 11 February 1949. Its report of August 1949 (Technical Report No. 102-AC 49/15-100, classified Secret, declassified 1 August 1952) analyzed 244 reports received through January 1949, with comments from an astronomical viewpoint by J. Allen Hynek predominating. About 32 percent were attributed to astronomical objects, 12 percent to weather balloons, 33 percent to hoaxes, vague reports or aircraft, and 23 percent were left "Unknown." Its recommendations included that the investigation be reduced in scope and that "the Psychological Warfare Division and other governmental agencies interested in psychological warfare" be informed of the results; it stated that "there are indications that the planned release of sufficient unusual aerial objects coupled with the release of related psychological propaganda would cause a form of mass-hysteria." A press release of 27 December 1949 announced the closing of the project.³

Reactivation under Ruppelt

After the Grudge report the work was folded into ordinary intelligence activity. On 10 September 1951 a radar sighting at the Army Signal Corps center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, which the project's report attributed to an operator's miscalculation of speed, drew the attention of Major General C. P. Cabell, Director of Air Force Intelligence, who ordered Grudge reactivated as an expanded project under Edward J. Ruppelt. Ruppelt headed it from 27 October 1951, and under the name Blue Book from March 1952, until he left the Air Force in September 1953; an Air Force fact sheet dates the change of name to 1953.⁴⁵⁶ In the closing months of 1951 Ruppelt arranged for the assistance of "a large well-known research organization in the Mid-West," which was to develop an interview questionnaire and make a statistical analysis of the reports; the Robertson Panel's list of evidence identifies the contract work of the Battelle Memorial Institute as Project Stork.⁴⁷

Air Force Letter 200-5 of 29 April 1952 directed bases to telegraph reports to both the Air Technical Intelligence Center and the Pentagon. Blue Book received 1,501 reports in 1952, against 210 in 1950 and 169 in 1951, with 536 in July 1952 alone, the month of the radar and visual sightings in the Washington, D.C. area.⁴ The memorandum of the Robertson Panel of January 1953 gives the 1952 figure as 1,900 "received through channels."⁷ An Air Force fact sheet lists 303 of the 1,501 reports of 1952 as unidentified, against 42 of 509 in 1953.¹

The Robertson Panel

In January 1953 the Panel, convened by the Central Intelligence Agency, heard Ruppelt, Hynek and Dewey Fournet, who had been project officer for Blue Book at the Pentagon for fifteen months, and watched the Navy's analysis of the Tremonton and Great Falls films. It recommended a training and "debunking" program integrated with the Air Technical Intelligence Center's work and an expanded Air Technical Intelligence Center staff, and recorded Brigadier General William N. Garland's wish to declassify reports and enlarge the unit. The Condon Report stated in 1968 that "little was done to implement" the Panel's recommendations and that the Blue Book status reports were not declassified until 9 September 1960.⁴⁷⁸

Staffing and direction

Captain Charles Hardin headed Blue Book from March 1954, Captain George T. Gregory from 1956, Major Robert J. Friend from 1958 and Major Hector Quintanilla from August 1963. A chronology hosted by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and drawing on the writer Jerome Clark states that the Air Force decided in 1955 that the goal of Blue Book should be to reduce the number of unidentified reports to a minimum, and that a revised Air Force Regulation 200-2 issued under Gregory emphasized that unexplained reports must be reduced to a minimum.⁹

Cases classed "Unidentified" numbered 42 in 1953, 46 in 1954, 24 in 1955, 14 in 1956 and 14 in 1957, then between 10 and 19 each year to 1965. Gerald K. Haines of the Agency's history staff gave the unexplained share as 5.9 percent in 1955 and 4 percent in 1956.⁴¹⁰

Hynek, Battelle and Project Stork

J. Allen Hynek served as astronomical consultant to the Air Force from 1948, and told a congressional committee in 1968 that the Air Force asked him twenty years earlier to weed out reports arising from astronomical objects.⁸¹¹

In 1953 Hynek ran Project Henry from Ohio State University, reviewing teletype reports from Wright-Patterson. His assistant Jennie Zeidman, later a board member of the Center for UFO Studies, wrote in 1991 that Hynek told her she was "working for a contractor" who "doesn't want to be known," that the weekly courier who delivered the reports was, as she established from a Columbus city directory, an employee of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, and that Blue Book Special Report 14, the statistical study of the reports, was in her words "a product of" Project Stork, whose mission was, as she put it, "to ascertain the capability of the Soviet Union to engage in technological warfare."¹² The minutes of the Robertson Panel record Hynek describing "the Project STORK support at Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus."⁷

From 1967 the consultancy ran through Subcontract 130-7000 between F. W. Dodge Company, a division of McGraw-Hill, and Hynek, dated 4 August 1967, covering 1 July 1967 to 30 June 1968 at $10 per hour for 750 hours, a maximum of $7,500, "for use under Prime Contract Number F33657-67-C-1447." Its stated objectives were to determine whether the phenomena "constitute a threat to the security of the United States," whether they "reveal any new, unique, or revolutionary scientific or technical information or techniques," and "methods of exploiting the possible scientific or technical potential of these phenomena/objects." A schedule filed with the subcontract, hosted by Jan Aldrich's Project 1947, tabulates Hynek's services for the "Aerial Phenomena Office" for fiscal years 1964 to 1968 at $23,322.50, with $10,082.94 in expenses.¹³

Regulations and reporting channels

Air Force Regulation 200-2, which succeeded Letter 200-5, was classed under "Intelligence Activities." The Condon Report quotes a paragraph of the regulation headed "Reduction of Percentage of UFO 'Unidentifieds'" that states "Air Force activities must reduce the percentage of unidentifieds to the minimum," while adding that "the elimination of all unidentifieds is improbable." Regulation 80-17 of 19 September 1960 and 80-17A of 8 November 1966 reclassed the UFO program under "Research and Development" and placed contact with the public and news media with the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of Information, to which private organizations seeking Air Force briefings or discussions on UFOs were to direct requests; base commanders could release information on a local sighting only after it had been "positively identified." The Condon Report's authors read the "reduce the percentage" paragraph as an instruction to investigate seriously and described critics of it as having "tried to read into this paragraph an exhortation that investigation is to result in common-place identifications at all costs."⁴¹⁴ Joint Army Navy Air Publication 146, "Canadian-United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings," issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, covers reports of vital importance to the security of the United States and Canada requiring "very urgent defensive and/or investigative action." Its list of reportable sightings includes "Unidentified flying objects" as item (c), and its section 208 states that unauthorized disclosure of such a report may expose a person to prosecution under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, chapter 37, while not requiring classification of the messages. The Condon Report wrote of such reports that "it would be most unwise that the military response to such circumstances be publicized, nor for that matter should the circumstances themselves be a matter of public knowledge."¹⁵

The Central Intelligence Agency and Blue Book

According to Haines, after the U-2 began test flights in 1955, Blue Book investigators who knew of them tried to explain the sightings to the public by natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions, and by checking with the Agency's U-2 project staff in Washington attributed many sightings to the aircraft, "careful, however, not to reveal the true cause of the sighting to the public." Haines wrote that Agency officers on the U-2 and OXCART programs later estimated that more than half of all reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, and that "this led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."¹⁰

The Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence had asked in 1952, through the Deputy Director for Intelligence, for research and development on the subject through the Air Force and the Research and Development Board, and the Robertson Panel followed; the Agency's history records that any mention of Agency sponsorship of the Panel was forbidden.¹⁶ In 1964 Director of Central Intelligence John McCone asked for an updated evaluation; the Office collected samples from the acting director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Richard Hall, and the Office's Assistant Director, Donald F. Chamberlain, told McCone on 26 January 1965 that the Office still monitored Blue Book.¹⁰ Haines cites an article by Quintanilla, "The Investigation of UFOs," in the fall 1966 issue (volume 10, number 4, pages 95 to 110) of the Agency's journal Studies in Intelligence.¹⁰

Review in 1966

An Air Force memorandum of 28 September 1965 from Major General E. B. LeBailly said 9,265 reports had been investigated by 30 June 1965, of which 663 could not be explained. The Scientific Advisory Board ad hoc committee under Brian O'Brien, including Carl Sagan, met on 3 February 1966 and reported that 646 of 10,147 sightings from 1947 through 1965 were listed as unidentified, that the program had "only one officer, a sergeant, and secretary," and that it should be strengthened by contracting university teams.¹⁷

On 20 and 21 March 1966 reports from Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, led Hynek to suggest at a press conference that swamp gas might account for them. On 28 March Representative Gerald Ford wrote to the chairmen of the House Committee on Armed Services and the House Committee on Science and Astronautics that "the Air Force sent a consultant, astrophysicist Dr. J. Allen Hynek" who "dismissed all of them," and the accompanying release called Hynek's explanation "flippant." The House Armed Services Committee held a one-day hearing on 5 April 1966 under L. Mendel Rivers, at which Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown announced the O'Brien committee's report.¹⁸¹⁹

Colorado, the National Academy and termination

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research contracted with the University of Colorado in 1966 for the study directed by Edward Condon (see the page on the committee), and the report's Section I stated that "only so much attention to the subject should be given as the Department of Defense deems to be necessary strictly from a defense point of view" and that "the defense function could be performed within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the continuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book, but this is a question for defense specialists rather than research scientists."²⁰²¹ A National Academy of Sciences panel under Gerald M. Clemence of Yale, with H. R. Crane, David M. Dennison, Wallace O. Fenn, H. Keffer Hartline, E. R. Hilgard, Mark Kac, Francis W. Reichelderfer, William W. Rubey, C. D. Shane and Oswald G. Villard Jr., concurred that "no high priority in UFO investigations is warranted by data of the past two decades."¹

An Air Force memorandum dated 20 October 1969, prepared by Major Espey of the Directorate of Research and Development with the signature block of Brigadier General C. H. Bolender, Deputy Director of Development, and titled by the National Investigations Committee site "The Bolender Draft (Not Memo)," states that Blue Book had two officers, one noncommissioned officer and one civilian full time and that Hynek "served as a scientific consultant until 1 July 1969." Its paragraph 4 states: "There is still, however, no evidence that Project Blue Book reports have served any intelligence function. Moreover, reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system." Its paragraph 6 states that termination "would leave no official federal office to receive reports of UFOs." Paragraph 8 recommends that the records of "over 13,000 sighting cases" be transferred to an archive "to prevent charges that the Air Force is concealing facts," and paragraph 9 records that the Air University would accept them if the Secretary's Office of Information answered all inquiries, "rigidly limit the right of access to recognized, legitimate researchers" and screen researchers' notes to ensure that "confidentiality" is maintained. The introduction on the NICAP site that hosts the text states, citing Brad Sparks, that the document had sixteen attachments, that Robert Todd obtained its release in January 1979 and spent years trying to get the Air Force to find and release the attachments, and that several remain unreleased.²²

On 17 December 1969 Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans Jr. announced termination, in a memorandum to Air Force Chief of Staff General John D. Ryan stating that continuation "cannot be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science."¹

Records

The Air Force retired the Blue Book records to the Air Force archives at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and in 1976 turned them over to the National Archives.¹⁰ The National Archives describes the textual records, "excluding names of people involved in the sightings," as about 2 cubic feet of unarranged project and administrative files, 37 cubic feet of case files and 3 cubic feet of records of the Office of Special Investigations, available on 94 rolls of microfilm (publication T-1206). On the same page it reports that searches of Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff records and of the National Security Council indexes for MJ-12, "majestic," and unidentified flying objects "were all negative except for" a one-page memorandum for General Twining from Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to the President, titled "NCS/MJ-12 Special Studies Project," dated 14 July 1954, which "refers to a briefing to take place on July 16" and "does not identify MJ-12 or the purpose of the briefing."²³ A Department of the Navy UFO fact sheet gives the files as 61 feet of case files, 20 reels of motion pictures, 23 sound recordings and 8,360 photographs.¹

The Project 1947 site states that the Blue Book files lack some reports Hynek forwarded under his contract, among them the Slidell, Louisiana "car buzzing" case of 8 December 1957 and Captain Frost's 1945 sighting, and that Hynek held a copy of the microfilm; the researcher Loren Gross, quoted there, wrote that his comparison of the microfilm with files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, the Center for UFO Studies and the papers of James E. McDonald found "very little overlap aside from well-known incidents."²⁴