{"it":{"id":"REC-BRK1960","name":"Brookings Report (1960)","kind":"gov","sub":"Released record","place":"Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA","lat":38.909,"lon":-77.039,"date":"1960; to Congress 18 Apr 1961","rep":"Commissioned by NASA from Brookings.","off":"A policy study, not UFO evidence.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Brookings Report","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report"}],"tags":["Records"],"sum":"In 1960 NASA commissioned a Brookings study that asked how society would react to evidence of extraterrestrial life, and when leaders might withhold it.","nsrc":1,"new":1,"qs":["In 1960 a NASA-commissioned report discussed when leaders might withhold news of extraterrestrial life. Should that decision ever belong to them?","If contact happened tomorrow, would you want to be told immediately, even if officials feared panic? Why?","The Brookings Report isn't evidence of UFOs. So why does it still unsettle people more than sixty years later?"],"yt":"Read the passage on withholding.","rel":["GOV-NASA"],"hook":"A 1960 report for NASA asked whether news of alien life should be shown to or withheld from the public.","why":"A real government-funded report that asked who should decide what the public learns about alien life."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"REC-BRK1960","sum":"Near the end of a long, sober report on the social effects of the space age, prepared for NASA in 1960, there is a sentence that still makes readers stop. Face-to-face meetings with intelligent beings from elsewhere, the authors wrote, would not occur within the next twenty years, unless their technology was more advanced than ours, \"qualifying it to visit earth.\" But \"artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus.\"\n\nThe document is formally titled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, and it is usually called the Brookings Report, after the Washington research institution that wrote it. NASA commissioned it through its Committee on Long-Range Studies, under a clause of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 that called for long-range studies of the benefits and problems of peaceful space activity. The study was directed by Donald N. Michael, a social psychologist with a background in the natural sciences, who was primarily responsible for its conclusions and final drafting. The Brookings staff and consultants met in a series of monthly two-day conferences, and interviewed more than 200 people. Among the outside readers who reviewed sections of the draft was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Brookings' president, Robert Calkins, signed the letter of transmittal on 30 November 1960, and the report was issued in December. On 18 April 1961 it went to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics of the 87th Congress, which reprinted it, and so it entered the public record.\n\nThe timing explains its mood. It came three years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and only months before Yuri Gagarin and then Alan Shepard flew into space. America's Mercury man-in-space program had begun only in 1959. No one knew what space would do to society, and NASA wanted the questions mapped before the answers arrived.\n\nMost of the report is about practical things. In about 186 pages, before the appendices, it covers satellite communications, observing that because satellites demanded high costs and heavy rockets, government support and control were necessary, even though American telecommunications had always been private business. It covers weather prediction from space, the technological by-products of the space effort, from telemetry to compact power sources and new materials, space industry, government staffing and foreign policy. In a section on attitudes and values, it looks at business executives, who seemed \"extremely reluctant to conclude that anything is impossible,\" at children born in the year of Sputnik, who would be voting within twenty years, and at the first astronauts, whose families made them \"normal\" Americans even as their military status let them take risks the public might not accept from family men.\n\nThen come about two pages titled \"The implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life.\" Recent publicity for attempts to detect messages from space by radio telescope, the authors wrote, had popularised and legitimised speculation about what such a discovery would do to human values. They thought it conceivable that there was semi-intelligent life somewhere in our own solar system, and noted that many cosmologists and astronomers thought intelligent life very likely in many other solar systems. Any contact in the next twenty years would most likely come by radio, which would mean the beings had at least equalled our own technology. The discovery \"would certainly be front-page news everywhere.\" It \"might lead to a greater unity of men on earth,\" or, because the distances would impose years of silence between messages, the fact of their existence \"might become simply one of the facts of life but probably not one calling for action.\"\n\nThe section's sharpest line is about us. \"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.\" How people reacted, the report said, would depend partly on their culture and religion, and partly on how their leaders behaved, and leaders would need to know far more about public attitudes than they did.\n\nSo it recommended research: continuing studies of how people understood and felt about the possibility of discovering intelligent life, and historical studies of how peoples and their leaders behave when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events. And it listed questions such studies might answer. \"How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?\"\n\nThose two sentences made the report famous. Some people who believe that contact has already happened, and that governments are hiding it, treat them as evidence of a policy of concealment. One proponent argued that by setting out plausible motives for suppressing a discovery, the report showed that suppression was under way. A civilian UFO research group wrote that the report gave weight to the idea that the earth might already be under close scrutiny by advanced civilisations. Others point out that those two sentences are the report's entire commentary on withholding the truth: it raised the possibility, took no position on whether it would be wise, and called only for more study. Brookings' own account of the report describes the aim as working out how such information might be shared or withheld. Nothing in the report claims that any discovery had been made.\n\nRead on its own terms, the report is a research plan, written by social scientists who expected the space age to unsettle settled ideas and wanted to be ready. The twenty years it looked ahead to have long since passed. But its questions were never really answered, and the people it imagined making the decision, leaders and the scientists who made the discovery, would still be the ones to make it. If a probe found something left behind on another world tomorrow, who would decide what the public was told, and how quickly?","qs":["Should that decision ever belong to leaders alone?","Who would count as the discovering scientists today?","Why was the question asked in 1960?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Brookings Report","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report"},{"id":"VREC-BRK1960-2","t":"NASA Technical Reports Server: document 19640053196 (PDF)","u":"https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19640053196/downloads/19640053196.pdf"},{"id":"VREC-BRK1960-3","t":"Brookings: the advice Brookings gave NASA about the space program in 1960","u":"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/communications-technology-and-extraterrestrial-life-the-advice-brookings-gave-nasa-about-the-space-program-in-1960/"}],"pts":[{"p":"Commissioned by NASA from Brookings in 1960.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Brookings Report","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report"},{"p":"Submitted to the House committee on 18 Apr 1961.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Brookings Report","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report"},{"p":"One section covers effects of finding ET life.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Brookings Report","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report"},{"p":"Discusses when leaders might withhold such news.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Brookings Report","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Report"}]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/REC-BRK1960-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Brookings Report (1960), Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA — The full report is available here…","by":"Michael, D.N.","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proposed_Studies_on_the_Implications_of_Peaceful_Space_Activities_For_Human_Affairs_Front.png","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}