{"it":{"id":"GOV-PBB","sub":"Declassified archive","name":"Project Blue Book records","place":"U.S. National Archives (NARA), USA","lat":38.998,"lon":-76.957,"date":"Project ran 1952 – 17 Dec 1969; records later retired to NARA","rep":"The Air Force gave the Blue Book files to the National Archives; they are open with witnesses' names removed.","off":"The project closed on 17 December 1969; NARA holds no sighting files after that date.","src":[{"t":"National Archives: Project BLUE BOOK – Unidentified Flying Objects","u":"https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos"},{"t":"US Air Force Fact Sheet 95-03: Unidentified Flying Objects and Air Force Project Blue Book","u":"https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104590/unidentified-flying-objects-and-air-force-project-blue-book/"},{"t":"US Air Force fact sheet: Unidentified Flying Objects and Project Blue Book (archived)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104590/unidentified-flying-objects-and-air-force-project-blue-book/"},{"t":"Condon Report (1968), Section I: Recommendations and conclusions (NCAS copy)","u":"https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-i.htm"},{"t":"Haines (1997), CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90 (CIA Studies in Intelligence, PDF)","u":"https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf"}],"tags":["Declassified","Archive","US Air Force","USA"],"kind":"gov","sum":"For more than twenty years the US Air Force collected reports of things seen in the sky. When it stopped, 701 of them were still unexplained.\n\nProject Blue Book was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and closed on 17 December 1969. Its records cover 1947 to 1969: 12,618 sightings, of which 701 stayed \"unidentified\". The Air Force drew three conclusions. No UFO was ever a threat to national security, nothing showed technology beyond modern science, and nothing showed that the unidentified cases were extraterrestrial vehicles. The files went to the National Archives, where they fill 94 rolls of microfilm with witness names removed.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the remainder, and why the project closed when it did.\n\nThe closure followed a University of Colorado study led by Edward Condon. Its report said that nothing from 21 years of UFO study had added to scientific knowledge, and that further study \"probably cannot be justified\". It also said it had \"no evidence of secrecy\". In 1997 the CIA historian Gerald Haines gave another side. He wrote that over half of the UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were spy-plane flights such as the U-2, and that Blue Book investigators, aware of them, tried to \"explain away\" the sightings with ice crystals and temperature inversions.\n\nIf some answers were cover stories, how far can we trust the 701 that remained?","qs":["Blue Book left 701 of 12,618 reports unidentified. Was closing it the right call?","Condon saw no secrecy; Haines described cover stories for spy planes. Can both be true?","What kind of evidence would make you reopen a case the Air Force closed?"],"yt":"701 of 12,618 is about 5.6%. Pick five unknowns from the NARA files and check what data each actually contains.","rel":["REC-SR14","REC-CON1968"],"hook":"Project Blue Book logged 12,618 sightings; 701 stayed unidentified.","nsrc":2,"why":"The Air Force left 701 UFO reports unexplained, and later it emerged that some answers were cover stories."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"GOV-PBB","src":[{"id":null,"t":"Gerald K. Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 40 no. 5 (1997), Central Intelligence Agency.","u":"https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"U.S. Air Force, Fact Sheet: “Unidentified Flying Objects and Air Force Project Blue Book.”","u":"https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104590/unidentified-flying-objects-and-air-force-project-blue-book/"},{"id":null,"t":"U.S. National Archives, “Project BLUE BOOK – Unidentified Flying Objects” (reference report, microfilm T-1206, and the 1985 Wright-Patterson fact sheet).","u":"https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos"},{"id":null,"t":"E. U. Condon (director), Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, University of Colorado, 1968/69, Section I: Recommendations and Conclusions.","u":"https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-i.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"U.S. Air Force, Project Blue Book case file, 9 December 1965 (memos of 10 December 1965), NARA microfilm released via The Black Vault.","u":"https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/projectbluebook/projectbluebook-kecksburg.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Project Blue Book (used last, for directors and dates).","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book"}],"sum":"At two o'clock in the morning a search party near Acme, Pennsylvania, gave up. A memo in an Air Force file records it in a single flat line: the search ended unsuccessfully at 0200. It was the night of 9 December 1965, when a fireball crossed the sky over several states and a village called Kecksburg acquired a story it has never lost. The file around that memo is a portrait of a busy office. There are notes of telephone calls from newspapers, from a doctor in Washington, and from the Pentagon. One caller from the Pentagon simply wanted the latest count of UFO cases for 1965, and was told 718. A summary card on top lists sightings in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Canada, and gives the verdict: an astronomical meteor.\n\nThat file is one of thousands in Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force's official investigation of unidentified flying objects. Blue Book began in March 1952, after two earlier efforts, Project Sign in 1947 and Project Grudge in 1949, and it was run from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Its first director was Captain Edward J. Ruppelt. Its scientific consultant from first to last was the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who had also worked for Sign and Grudge. Major Hector Quintanilla took charge in August 1963. On 17 December 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced that it was over.\n\nThe totals are the heart of the record. From 1947 to 1969, according to the Air Force's own fact sheet, 12,618 sightings were reported to Blue Book, and 701 remained \"unidentified.\" That is about one report in eighteen, roughly 5.6 percent. The Air Force retired the files to the National Archives, which has declassified them and opened them to researchers with the names of witnesses removed. The Archives describes about 37 cubic feet of case files arranged by date, plus project files and Office of Special Investigations records, and counts a cubic foot at about 2,000 pages; on that rule of thumb the whole collection runs to roughly 84,000 pages. Researchers read it on 94 rolls of 35mm microfilm. The Archives adds one plain limit: \"The project closed in 1969 and we have no information on sightings after that date.\"\n\nBlue Book's direction was set early, and not by the Air Force alone. In January 1953 a panel of scientists sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and chaired by the physicist H. P. Robertson met to consider the problem. According to the CIA's own later history, the panel worried that UFO reports could clog military communication channels and induce \"hysterical mass behavior.\" It recommended that the National Security Council \"debunk UFO reports\" and run a programme of public education, suggesting the use of mass media, schools and even the Disney corporation. It recommended that two private UFO groups be watched for subversive activity. For years the CIA refused to declassify the panel's full report or admit its own role.\n\nThis is the political layer of the story, and it concerns the order of events. The conclusion that the public should be reassured arrived first. Most of Blue Book's 12,618 reports arrived afterwards.\n\nThe official case, at full strength, is that Blue Book did its job and found nothing of consequence. The Air Force's conclusions were threefold. No UFO had ever indicated a threat to national security. There was no evidence that unidentified sightings represented technology beyond present-day science. And there was no evidence they were extraterrestrial vehicles. The closure followed a study at the University of Colorado led by the physicist Edward Condon, reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. Condon's verdict was blunt: \"Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge.\" His report added a sentence that would age badly: \"We have no evidence of secrecy concerning UFO reports.\"\n\nNearly three decades later, the CIA published its own history of the subject, written by Gerald K. Haines. It records that by August 1955 the agency was testing the U-2, a spy plane flying far higher than airliners, whose silver skin caught the sun and looked, from below, like a fiery object. Blue Book investigators who knew of the secret flights, Haines wrote, \"tried to explain away such sightings\" as ice crystals and temperature inversions. By checking with the U-2 project staff they could attribute many sightings to the flights, but they \"were careful, however, not to reveal the true cause\" to the public. CIA officials later estimated that manned reconnaissance flights accounted for \"over half of all UFO reports\" from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Haines called the result \"misleading and deceptive statements to the public.\" The share of sightings the Air Force counted as unexplained fell to 5.9 percent in 1955 and 4 percent in 1956, the very years the secret flights were driving reports up.\n\nThe official reading survives even this. The secret behind the sightings, on that view, was American aircraft, not visitors, and the files were later opened for anyone to read.\n\nBut the admission changes how every page in the collection must be read. If Blue Book gave knowingly false natural explanations to protect a spy plane, then its explanations cannot all be taken at face value, and the record does not mark which ones were covers. The Haines estimate is a share, not a list. The microfilm gives no flag on the cases where \"ice crystals\" meant something else. Two kinds of answer sit side by side in the same official prose: honest mistakes about meteors and planets, and deliberate mistakes about American aircraft.\n\nThat leaves two numbers worth holding in mind. The first is 701, the cases the Air Force itself chose to leave open after a generation of looking, with all its resources and every incentive to close them. The second is 11,917, the cases it did explain, some unknown number of them with stories it knew were untrue. The question is no longer only what the 701 were. It is how far the confident labels on the other files can be trusted, and whether any of the cases marked solved belong, in truth, beside the ones marked unknown.\n\nThe Air Force has said it is unlikely ever to take up such a costly project again, and the Archives holds nothing after 1969. Somewhere on those 94 rolls of film, between a summary card that says \"meteor\" and a memo that says the search ended at 0200, sits the whole record of the twenty-two years in which the Air Force answered the phone about the sky. The last two rolls hold only the photographs."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/GOV-PBB-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Project Blue Book records, U.S. National Archives (NARA), USA — I just discovered that I have an original Air Force Project Blue Book Report from 1966. Nothing to see here. 👽 They…","by":"Steve Jurvetson","lic":"CC BY 2.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Project_Blue_Book.png","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/GOV-PBB.webp","by":"US Air Force","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Project_Blue_Book,_complete_status_reports.pdf","cap":"Project Blue Book, complete status reports.pdf"}]},"hh":[{"v":"12,618","u":"reports","h":"Sighting reports in the Air Force files","s":[345]},{"v":"701","u":"unidentified","h":"Reports still listed as “unidentified” when the project closed","s":[345]}],"hs":{"345":["Wikipedia: Project Blue Book (USAF Fact Sheet 95-03 figures)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book"]}}