{"it":{"id":"REC-CON1968","name":"Condon Report (1968)","kind":"gov","sub":"Released record","place":"University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA","lat":40.007,"lon":-105.265,"date":"1966-10 – 1968","rep":"Colorado accepted the contract on 6 October 1966.","off":"Its conclusion, that further study was unlikely to yield discoveries, closed Blue Book in 1969. Its own Case 5 ends: 'The phenomenon remains unidentified.'","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Condon Committee","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee"},{"t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"},{"t":"Condon Report (1968), Case 5, text hosted by NCAS","u":"https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/case05.htm"}],"tags":["Records"],"sum":"The Air Force paid the University of Colorado $325,000 for an 18-month scientific study of UFOs under the physicist Edward U. Condon. The report appeared in 1968. Among other work, the team examined 59 cases in detail.\n\nCondon's general conclusion was that 'nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge', and that further extensive study 'probably cannot be justified'. A panel of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed it late in 1968 and called it 'a very credible effort'. The Air Force closed Project Blue Book on 17 December 1969.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is that the report's own case studies did not all end in answers. In one, a B-47 crew in 1957 described a light seen by eye, on ground radar and on their own receivers; the team concluded it 'remains unidentified'.\n\nJ. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's own scientist, was among those who criticised the report, as AARO's 2024 history notes. Their objection was that the summary was more certain than the case files. The report's reply was that unexplained cases rested on poor or old data, and that nothing in them justified a science program.\n\nThe open question is whether a study can fairly declare a subject closed while some of its own cases stay open.","nsrc":3,"new":1,"qs":["The Condon Report closed Blue Book, yet its own Case 5 'remains unidentified'. Should the summary or the cases have guided policy?","Over $500,000 to conclude UFOs weren't worth studying. Was that science, or the answer the Air Force was paying for?","If a modern study left unexplained radar-visual cases in its files, would you accept 'nothing to see here' as its conclusion?"],"yt":"Count the cases the report left unexplained and set the number beside its conclusion.","rel":["UFO-RB47-1957","UFO-LAK1956"],"hook":"The Condon Report found 'nothing' added to science in 21 years, yet left some cases unexplained.","why":"The scientific study that ended official US investigation of UFOs for half a century."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"REC-CON1968","qs":["Condon said nothing had been added to science in 21 years. Could some cases still be worth study?","The National Academy of Sciences backed the report. Does that settle its method?","Should a study's summary report its unexplained cases more prominently?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Condon Committee","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee"},{"t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"},{"t":"Condon Report (1968), Case 5, text hosted by NCAS","u":"https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/case05.htm"},{"id":"VREC-CON1968-4","t":"Condon Report (1968), Section I: Recommendations and conclusions (NCAS copy)","u":"https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/sec-i.htm"}],"pts":[{"p":"University of Colorado accepted on 6 Oct 1966.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Condon Committee","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee"},{"p":"USAF offer $313,000; total later over $500,000.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: Condon Committee","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee"},{"p":"Concluded UFO study unlikely to yield discoveries.","g":"VERIFIED","b":"V","t":"Wikipedia: Condon Committee","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Committee"},{"p":"NAS panel reviewed it in late 1968.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"},{"p":"Case 5 (RB-47) left unidentified.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Condon Report (1968), Case 5, text hosted by NCAS","u":"https://files.ncas.org/condon/text/case05.htm"}],"sum":"In late January 1967, about three months into an Air Force-funded scientific study of flying saucers, its director gave a lecture. The government, Edward Condon said, should not study UFOs, because the subject was nonsense. Then he added, \"but I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year.\"\n\nCondon was among the most distinguished physicists of his time, a former director of the National Bureau of Standards whose clashes with the House Un-American Activities Committee and loyalty boards in the 1940s and 1950s had made him almost legendary among scientists. The Air Force had chosen him after a long search. Its own UFO program, Project Blue Book, had been criticised through the 1960s by politicians, journalists and scientists as shoddy, or as a cover-up. After a wave of reports in 1965, Blue Book's consulting astronomer, J. Allen Hynek, asked the Air Force's scientific advisers to re-examine it; a committee chaired by Brian O'Brien suggested working with university teams. Several universities, among them Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and North Carolina, declined. On 6 October 1966 the University of Colorado agreed, with Condon as scientific director and Robert J. Low, an assistant dean, as coordinator. The contract has been reported both as $313,000, rising above $500,000, and as $325,000 for an 18-month study, which is the figure the Defense Department's 2024 history of the subject uses.\n\nThe team was made up of people with no prior position on UFOs: physicists, psychologists, an astronomer, a chemist, an electrical engineer. As a result, the staff lacked expertise in the subject. Members worked largely without coordination and took different views of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Civilian UFO groups such as NICAP and APRO shared their files.\n\nThen the project split open. In July 1967 the atmospheric physicist James McDonald learned of a memo Low had written on 9 August 1966, before the contract was signed, to reassure university administrators. The study would be run almost entirely by non-believers, Low wrote. \"The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.\" In the fallout, Condon dismissed two staff members, the principal investigator David Saunders and the engineer Norman Levine, for alleged incompetence. NICAP cut its ties on 30 April 1968. Look magazine called the project a \"$500,000 trick,\" and Low resigned that May. Some insiders later defended him: Saunders himself said it was unfair to paint Low as a plotter, and the investigator Roy Craig said the memo did not reflect Condon's views.\n\nThe final report, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, was delivered to the Air Force in November 1968 and released in January 1969, though histories date it to 1968. It ran to 1,485 pages in hardcover. It detailed 59 case studies, with locations changed for legal reasons, and dealt with photographs, radar sightings, physical traces and reports by astronauts. Condon wrote the opening \"Conclusions and Recommendations,\" and its central sentence is the one everyone remembers. \"Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge.\" Further extensive study \"probably cannot be justified.\" He found no evidence of a defence hazard and no evidence of official secrecy. He even recommended that teachers stop giving students credit for reading UFO books.\n\nThe mainstream verdict sided with him. A National Academy of Sciences panel, which did not conduct its own investigation, called the work \"a very credible effort to apply… techniques of science to the solution of the UFO problem,\" and judged extraterrestrial visitation the least likely explanation. The journal Science called it the most thorough investigation of the phenomenon ever conducted. On 17 December 1969 the Air Force closed Project Blue Book.\n\nInside the report, the picture was less tidy. Condon himself wrote that his recommendation against a new federal agency \"may not be true for all time,\" and that agencies should consider UFO research proposals \"on an open-minded, unprejudiced basis.\" On the 1956 Lakenheath case in England, the team concluded that \"the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appears to be fairly high.\" Hynek wrote that the committee had been unable to explain more than a quarter of the cases it examined, and called Condon's introduction \"singularly slanted.\" A committee consultant, Gerald Rothberg, said three or four of the hundred or so cases he studied had left him puzzled.\n\nCase 5 shows why. At a project conference for air base UFO officers in Boulder in June 1967, one officer said he had met something while piloting a B-47 ten years earlier. Over the south central United States one autumn morning in 1957, at about 30,000 feet, a monitor in the back of the plane picked up a strong signal at about 2,800 megahertz that moved the wrong way across the screen for anything on the ground. A white light crossed in front of the aircraft faster than any plane. A target then held at the two o'clock position while the pilot changed speed. Ground radar reported that it saw both the B-47 and the other target, ten miles away. The object glowed a huge, steady red, vanished from sight and from every radar as the jet flew over it, then reappeared lower down, and vanished again as the pilot dived at it. Ten plasma specialists consulted by the project said known plasma physics could not explain it. Blue Book had no record of the event. The Air Defense Command found none, and the SAC wing's history mentioned no incident. The report's verdict was that the phenomenon \"remains unidentified.\"\n\nThe crew's memories differed on one point that mattered. The pilot remembered intelligence officers taking film and recordings off the plane. Two other officers said nothing had been recorded at all, because the flight was only an equipment check. The first radar monitor had been fitted to film its own display, they said, but no film had been loaded, and the following day the crew left for England. Somewhere in the history of the study that closed the subject, there is a camera trained on a glowing screen with nothing inside it."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/REC-CON1968-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Condon Report (1968), University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA — Photograph of Edward Uhler Condon, Physicist and director of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) now NIST from…","by":"","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_U._Condon.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}