Project Blue Book: Exposed

So, What Do We Make of All This?

At the end of Project Blue Book in 1969, the Air Force released a fact sheet about its study of UFOs. It reported that Air Force investigators had studied 12,618 reports and identified all but 701. According to the fact sheet "Of these total sightings, 11,917 were found to have been caused by material objects (such as balloons, satellites and aircraft), immaterial objects (such as lightning, reflections and other natural phenomena), astronomical objects (such as stars, planets, the sun and the moon), weather conditions and hoaxes. As indicated only 701 reported sightings remain unexplained."

The question that must be asked is if the 701 unexplained sightings are a significant number. It is a small number compared to the total of sightings reported. Air Force officers and scientists reviewing the data have suggested that had "complete" information been available, the sightings would have been explained. It was a failure on the part of those reporting the sighting, or on the part of the officers investigating the sighting. Had they been able to do the "job" right, an explanation would have been found.

But let's look at the Air Force investigation as we have seen studied it. The Mantell case is particularly illustrative of a point. Mantell was killed chasing something that neither he, nor those on the ground who saw it could explain. To all of them, it was something other than a natural phenomenon and it certainly wasn't a balloon. All were familiar with balloons and this thing was just too big.

Given the range of the sightings, that is, the object was seen in towns separated by something on the order of 175 miles, a single weather balloon could not account for the sighting. Whatever it was had to be huge and very high, or the sightings, those seeming to be were, in fact, unrelated.

The investigators finally settled on Venus as the culprit. Spotting Venus in the daytime, under the best conditions, is difficult. The weather reports suggested that the weather conditions were not the best. There was a layer of haze that should have obscured Venus.

The investigators decided it was a weather balloon, though there seemed to be no evidence to support the claim. Finally, they decided on a combination of Venus and two weather balloons. It was a wholly unsatisfactory explanation. The case, in 1948, should have been labeled as "unidentified" because they didn't have a real explanation for it.

Now, looking back on it, reading the file, and knowing of the classified Navy project called Skyhook, we can see what the solution is. Mantell, as well as those on the ground, in those widely separated locations, saw a Skyhook balloon. The descriptions provided by the witnesses, as well size and shape of the balloon, makes it clear. Today, the Mantell case should be written off as a Skyhook, but in 1948, it was unidentified.

The point here is that the Mantell case was not Venus, as the Air Force said, it was not a weather balloon as the Air Force said, and it was not a combination of weather balloons and Venus as the Air Force said. It was, in fact, a single balloon, of a type that was new and unknown to the majority of the people in the United States in 1948. The Air Force, in 1948, had no answer to the case, but they labeled it as identified nonetheless.

This tells us that, at one time, the Air Force was interested in labeling the cases but not solving them. By rushing to slap the label on the case, they harmed their own credibility when the actual solution was discovered. UFO believers, scientists, military officers, and the rest of us would have been more accepting of their "final" solution had they not blunted the impact of it with a number of other, unacceptable answers.

In fact, by studying the trend in explanations, we can put together a history of the UFO project as it began in the summer of 1947. Ed Ruppelt, in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, reported that the Pentagon was in a panic during the summer of 1947. There were reports of flying saucers all over the country, but officials didn't know what they were. There was a press for immediate answers. If flying saucers were real, and extraterrestrial, control of the sky was gone. If they were real, then questions about an alien invasion became very real.

But that was the summer of 1947 when the phenomenon was still new. Ruppelt wrote, "As 1947 drew to a close, the Air Force's Project Sign had outgrown its initial panic and settled down to a routine operation." It meant that those at the top had realized that alien invasion fleets were not standing by to land. In fact, some may have thought, after the summer, that if they waited long enough, the fad would end and there would be no reason to worry.

In the summer of 1948, it became clear that the Chief of Staff of the Air Force didn't believe that UFOs were extraterrestrial. A report sent to him was slapped back and those who had authored it found themselves searching for new work. The lieutenants and captains in the Air Force was smart enough to see that suggesting UFOs were real was not a way to advance their careers. Answers were what was wanted and answers they supplied. UFO cases that had been puzzling were suddenly solved. The explanations might have flown in the face of the facts, but that didn't matter. The Chief of Staff wanted answers.

The only time that the official Air Force investigation progressed with what could be objectivity was a short period from the end of 1951 to the very beginning of 1953. Is it any wonder then, that about forty percent of the cases listed as unidentified came from that period?

After that, in document after document, in report after report, and policy shift after policy shift, there is a single uniting thread. UFO sightings are to be explained. It doesn't matter if the facts must be ignored, the case is to be solved.

Take, as just a single example that we studied earlier, the report from Minot Air Force Base. The Air Force would have us believe that the men assigned to the Strategic Air Command are incapable of recognizing a B-52 when it flies over. The investigators would have us believe that these same men are incapable of recognizing the stars in the sky. And, to explain the radar returns, they would have us believe that plasmas, a phenomenon that had just come into the public arena, was responsible for those sightings. Those investigators would even ignore the fact that radars other than that on the aircraft was affected. Plasmas sounded good in 1968.

Well, I found a physicist who knew something about plasmas, talked to him about the case, and was told the explanation was ridiculous. The Air Force officer was just looking for a way to write the case off. The plasma answer didn't make sense to him. Of course, to other Air Force officers and to the news media and general public who knew nothing of plasma physics, the explanation sounded credible and that was all they wanted. An answer that would be believed. They knew that most of us would not have the time or the training to review the case closely. They provided a scientific sounding explanation and slapped it on the file.

What this tells us, as do some of the other cases we examined that had ridiculous explanations like the police officers who chased Venus or the private pilot who tried to intercept Venus or a Sundog, was that they would slap explanations on sightings. When the Air Force statement suggests that only 701 sightings were listed as unidentified, they don't mention all the others that are mislabeled. In my survey of the files, I found dozens of reports that seemed to have been "solved" in a similar fashion.

This also suggests that even if the 701 sightings that were unexplained were not a significant number, when we add in those that had solutions that were less than accurate, the number increases. If we added only three hundred, a very conservative number, then we suddenly have a thousand sightings that aren't explained, or about one in twelve. Is that a significant number?

But let's take it even further, which we can. What the Air Force status sheet didn't tell anyone was that many of the cases were labeled as insufficient data for a scientific analysis. Although there were few such cases in the beginning of the project, by the end many of them were labeled as such.

It should be pointed out here that calling a case "Insufficient data" is not an explanation. It is merely a label. But, the point would be to keep the case from the unidentifieds. By doing so, they are not counted in the 701 sightings labeled as unidentified.

In the course of this work, I reviewed a number of those cases. In some of them there just wasn't enough information to make a proper evaluation. If, for example, a single witness saw a bright light move across the sky at three 'o'clock in the morning, how could the Air Force be expected to "solve" the riddle. It could have been a meteor that was distinctive enough that it fooled the witness? What if it was a private plane with the landing lights on and the wind blowing hard enough to push the engine noise away from the witness? What if it was spotlights playing across a cloud? There simply isn't enough information and the Air Force investigators were right in labeling it as insufficient data.

But the majority of the cases weren't like that. There was a great deal of accurate and precise information supplied by the witnesses. Sometimes there was more than one witness. The thickness of the file and the amount of the information seems to have overwhelmed the officers reviewing it. There was too much information so that many of the old stand-by answers such as a weather balloon or Venus just couldn't be bent to fit the mold. Rather than suggest an unexplained case, the report was stamped with insufficient data.

In one case, one of the very last to labeled as unidentified, the witness was furious when his case was stamped as insufficient data. He filled out another of the Air Force forms and then added a long statement to question thirty-five which asks for additional "information which you feel pertinent and which is not adequately covered in the specific points of the questionnaire or a narrative explanation of your sighting." He wrote, "It is a real mystery to me why you state in your August 21 missive, 'The information which we received is not sufficient for a scientific evaluation,' in consideration of the fact that the very thorough report which Lieutenant Foreman took and supposedly submitted to you contained far more definitive information… than could be elicited via your questionnaire."

The witness continued, adding that more information was available through Foreman's report than in the form that was being sent, but that their handling of the case "leads me to believe… That accusations of negligence heaped upon you… by some independent investigations in recent years may NOT be entirely unfounded."

Like the rest of us, this witness was left wondering what was missing from his reports and those of Lieutenant Foreman. What data was needed so that a scientific analysis could be made. It seemed to him that a great deal of time and effort was going into the collection of data that when received and processed revealed nothing or was lacking in some critical area.

After evaluating the new information, and realizing that the witness had not only a good education but a technical background, they changed the status from insufficient to unidentified. The Air Force officers had found themselves in another of the famous holes.

But the case does raise an interesting question. What was left out of the questionnaire that should have been included? The Air Force, with the help of the Battelle Institution had spent years designing the form to gather precisely the type of information that the Air Force would need to gather. Several different versions had been tried and then revised. Even top UFO critic and UFO debunker, Dr. Donald Menzel, had supplied the Air Force with his thoughts on the questionnaire used. Menzel wrote about the design of the questionnaire, "I don't know who is at fault, but the questionnaire seems cleverly designed to avoid asking the most vital questions and to get the wrong answers. In response to my repeated criticisms, the Air Force asked me to suggest revisions for the new printing. I spent several weeks detailing the revisions and giving my reasons therefore. But they adopted only a few of my suggestions, rejecting the remainder because they considered them to be an invasion of privacy."

Menzel was quick to point out other inadequacies. "The original questionnaire determined whether or not the person was wearing glasses, but did not find out whether a person who was not wearing glasses was supposed to be wearing them. I wanted to know how long it had been since the witness had had an eye examination. I even wanted to know the nature of the correction."

While it seems that Menzel was delving into areas that were personal and private, and may not have relevant to the investigation, it is also obvious that the Air Force questionnaire, from a scientific standpoint was not complete. There were standard questions that should have been asked and that clearly were not.

Finally, it must be noted that a large number of the cases marked as insufficient data were marked because the Air Force questionnaire had not been completed in what the Air Force officers thought a reasonable amount of time. This was a complex document that ran to several pages, calling for some precise information. The Air Force officers, when confronted with a sighting, apparently felt it was sufficient to send out a questionnaire, but apparently never believed it necessary to make follow-up inquiries. If their form was not completed, then the case was written off as insufficient data.

In a review of the number of sightings for the period of 1-10 July 1967, picked at random, I found that ten of the thirty-four sightings were listed as insufficient data. One of the sightings, from Lizelia, Mississippi was listed as unidentified. One was listed as being unreliable, which meant the witness had made other UFO sightings. And one was listed as "confusing data."

All in all, there were thirteen sightings that were unexplained, though only one was listed as such. The other twelve were labeled, but they certainly weren't explained. That means that about thirty percent of the sightings have no explanation on them. Or, in other words, about four thousand of the twelve thousand Blue Book sightings are not explained. Is that a significant number?

Let's stop for a moment and look at the unreliable reports. The thinking of the Air Force officers was probably that seeing a UFO was such a rare circumstance that no one would have the opportunity twice. If they did report UFOs on more than one occasion, that would mean that the witness was unfamiliar with the sky and was therefore unreliable. No reason to investigate a case in which the witness couldn't distinguish between what was supposed to be in the sky and what wasn't supposed to be there.

Such thinking does make some sense. If a person can't recognize the stars, the moon, meteors, or in some cases, the lights on radio towers that had been in the area for years, why waste time and a questionnaire. The observer was unreliable.

Interestingly, that doesn't hold true. Charles B. Moore made UFO reports to the Air Force project on two occasions. Both his sightings are labeled as "unidentified." His first sighting, near Array, New Mexico, isn't very spectacular. Moore, along with a crew from General Mills, and a naval officer Douglas C. McLaughlin (misidentified in some reports as Robert or "R" McLaughlin according to an AFOSI document in the Project Blue Book file) were launching balloons. They had "released 350 gram balloon about 1020 MST and were following it with a standard ML-47 David White Theodolite." Moore made a reading at 10:30 a.m. and then took over at the theodolite.

According to his report, made to Project Grudge, he had looked up to acquire the balloon with the naked eye and spotted what he thought was the balloon. Moore wrote, "When the distance between the theodolite and the supposed balloon became apparent, I took over the theodolite and found the true balloon still there, whereupon I abandoned it and picked up the object after it came out of the sun. The object was moving too fast to crank the theodolite around; therefore, one of the men pointed the theodolite and I looked. The object was ellipsoid… white in color except for a light yellow of one side as thought it were in shadow."

"The object," according to Moore, "was not a balloon and was some distance away. Assuming escape velocity, a track is enclosed which figures elevation above the station of about 300,000 feet over the observed period. If this is true, the flight would have probably gone over the White Sands Proving Ground (later White Sands Missile Range), Holloman Air Force Base, and Los Alamos."

They lost sight of the object in the distance, after watching it for about 60 seconds. They had made measurements using their equipment and a stopwatch but took no photographs.

Menzel, of course, later did what the Air Force couldn't in their investigation. He identified the object seen by Moore and his crew. According to Menzel, the object was a mirage. That is, Menzel believed it to be an atmospheric reflection of the true balloon, making it appear as if there were two objects in the sky instead of one. He was so sure of this that he told Moore about the solution.

Moore, however, is an atmospheric physicist. He is as qualified as Menzel to discuss the dynamics of the atmosphere, and, according to him when interviewed on El Paso radio station KTSM, the weather conditions were not right for the creation of mirages. Since Moore was on the scene, and since his training qualified him to make judgments about the conditions of the atmosphere at the time of the sighting, his observations are more important than Menzel's wild speculations.

When Moore spoke to Menzel, the Harvard professor would not listen to what Moore had to say. Menzel had found what to him was a satisfactory solution for the sighting, and he didn't want to discuss it seriously, or have his conclusions challenged. Air Force investigators, however, left the sighting labeled as "unidentified."

Just over two years later, on October 11, 1951, Moore, still conducting balloon research with General Mills, along with a number of other people including J.J. Kaliszewki, Doug Smith and Dick Reilly spotted another UFO. The object came in high and fast, slowed, and then made slow climbing circles for two minutes before it shot off to the east. A second one appeared, and using a theodolite, it was carefully observed, as it flew across the sky.

Moore, then, according to the Air Force files was one of those rare birds who saw UFOs on two separate occasions. Both times he was able to make observations using his equipment. And, as mentioned, on both occasions, his sightings were not readily identifiable.

Moore, however, is not alone. Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, the only living human to have discovered a planet in our Solar System, reported UFOs on more than one occasion. According to Tombaugh, "I saw the object about eleven o'clock on night in August 1949 from the backyard of my home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I happened to be looking at zenith, admiring the beautiful transparent sky of stars, when suddenly I spied a geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light similar to the 'Lubbock lights' [It should be noted that his report was written after the Lubbock Lights case in September 1951]. My wife and her mother were sitting in the yard with me and they saw them also. The group moved south-southeasterly, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, their space of formation smaller, (at first about one degree across) and the intensity duller, fading from view at about 35 degrees above the horizon. Total time of visibility was about three seconds. I was too flabbergasted to count the number of rectangles of light, or to note some other features I wondered about later. There was no sound. I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight so strange of this. The rectangles were of low luminosity; had there been a full moon in the sky, I am sure they would not have been visible."

Naturally, Tombaugh's sighting, because of who he is, has caused a great deal of speculation. Donald Menzel wrote about it, praising Tombaugh as a scientist, but then, after a fashion, explaining that Tombaugh had been fooled because of a thin inversion layer over New Mexico that night.

Menzel, in his 1953 book, Flying Saucers wrote, "But what were these mysterious lights? I can only hazard here the same guess I made about the Lubbock lights — that a low, thin layer of haze or smoke reflected the lights of a distant house or some other multiple source. The haze must have been inconspicuous to the eye, because Tombaugh comments on the unusual clarity of the sky." (Must I actually note that Tombaugh commented on the unusual clarity of the sky but Menzel postulates a thin layer of haze. It seems to be a real contradiction.)

A year or two after his first sighting, Tombaugh had a second that he told to J. Allen Hynek, who reported it in a memo that was originally classified. According to that document, Tombaugh, "while at Telescope No. 3 at White Sands observed an object of -6 magnitude travelling from the zenith to the southern horizon in about three seconds. The object executed the same maneuvers as the nighttime luminous object he had seen earlier."

What this demonstrates is that the Air Force criterion for rejecting the sightings of those who report UFOs more than once is flawed. It shouldn't have been assumed that anyone seeing UFOs more than once is unreliable. Certainly, there are unreliable observers out there, but the criterion should be more than multiple sightings. Air Force rejection of sightings for that reason alone was proper, and it wasn't scientific.

This idea goes hand in hand with another. That is, the higher the education of the observer, and the more details provided for the sighting, the more likely it will be identified. A survey of the data showed that the opposite was true. The higher the education and the more information provided resulted in a lower number of the cases being solved. A light in the night sky, if an airplane can be found in the right place, is easy to explain. But a disc-shaped object, at high noon, with observers on the ground and in the air, is difficult to observe, unless you ignore some of the data. That is, of course exactly what happened in the Salt Lake City case.

We have mentioned the name of Donald Menzel a number of times. He "solved" cases that others had left as unidentified. He applied a skeptical eye to the case, finding solutions where others could not. He challenged the observers, such as C.B. Moore, inventing conditions that those at the scene never saw. He told Moore that he'd seen a mirage, but Moore, equally qualified, and on the scene, said he hadn't.

Menzel couldn't accept the fact there might be extraterrestrial visitors. Since there couldn't be, he knew that the answer had to lie elsewhere. This is not exactly good science.

In the paper he presented to the symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on December 26 and 27, 1969, he castigated Dr. James McDonald for what he considers to be mistakes in McDonald's research, his beliefs about UFOs, and for not reporting everything about a case so that he, McDonald, can present a persuasive argument for his opinions.

Menzel, writing about the Chiles and Whitted case, suggested, "He accuses me of glossing 'over the reported rocking of the DC-3.' Nonsense! There was no mention of such 'rocking' in the official report."

The statement by Menzel is interesting for a couple of reasons. As noted in the chapter on the Chiles and Whitted case, the newspaper articles do report that Chiles mentioned a buffeting of the aircraft. But, when I searched the statements made by both Chiles and Whitted to official investigators, including those they wrote themselves, mentioned nothing about the turbulence.

The only conclusion we can draw is that there was no turbulence. Where did McDonald get the idea. Clearly he did not have access to the official file, as did Menzel. So McDonald's mistake was that he didn't see the official file, and that wasn't his fault.

On the Salt Lake City case Menzel, who insisted that it was a sundog, wrote, "During all this time ground observers reported no motion whatever."

Remember, Menzel clearly had access to the official files. I read them before writing the sections here, and, as mention, I selected parts of those official statements because they proved that the people on the ground did say they saw the object move. Menzel was clearly wrong here. He had to know the truth, but he spouted the party line none the less.

So, given that, who engaged in the worst "science?" Menzel or McDonald. Clearly it was Menzel. He had to know the truth, but glossed over it in his rush to solve the sighting.

All this leads to still another question. Remember the date of the symposium was late December 1969. The Project Blue Book files were supposedly classified. How did Menzel know, in 1969, what was in the files? The answer is that he had read them. He was working for the Air Force. He was consulting for the Air Force. That explains how he knew what was in the files, and it explains that why, out of all the people who had written books about UFOs, including former head of Project Blue Book Ed Ruppelt, only the galleys of Menzel's books were in the files.

It also tells us something about the make of the Air Force team who investigated UFOs. Menzel was a rabid debunker. In a letter to me, he explained that all sightings could be explained, for the most part by misidentifications of natural phenomena, delusion, or conventional craft seen in unconventional circumstances. In all the other cases, the sightings were the result of "damned liars." For a scientist, he didn't have a very scientific attitude.

We can also see, in his handling of the Lubbock Lights case were his mindset was. While a persuasive argument can be made that the first of the sightings, by the professors on the porch, might be some sort of natural phenomena, such an explanation fails to explain the photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr. Menzel tried, as he had with other sightings, multiple explanations. This suggests, of course, that he doesn't have a clue and just wants to explain them away. When his multiple explanations failed to gain much attention, he decided, with no evidence whatsoever, that the photographs were a hoax.

That attitude was reflected by the personnel in Project Blue Book. Hector Quintanilla went out of his way to suggest solutions to sightings that were ridiculous. When police officers chased a glowing object from Ohio to Pennsylvania, he decided it was a combination of Echo I and Venus. He made his assessment based on a telephone conversation with a single witness, asked only a couple of questions, and had completed his investigation. Only under congressional pressure and orders from the Pentagon did he make the trip from Dayton, Ohio across the state.

The interview with the police officers was not an attempt to gather additional information. It was an attempt by Quintanilla to convince the witnesses that they had seen a satellite and Venus. He didn't seem to be interested in hearing how the object had been within a hundred feet of the witnesses, or how its illumination lighted the road under it. Quintanilla had "solved" the case, and solved it stayed.

What this tells, or rather confirms, is that the Air Force project was in the business of solving UFO sightings and not investigating them. It also tells us that an unidentified label was the kiss of death. The point was to reduce the number of unidentified cases to a point where they came statistically insignificant and that point could be made to the public. Air Force officials insisted that, with complete information, all cases would have been identified.

How can we be sure that this is the case? Remember the letter written by an officer about Air Force Regulation 200-2. He wrote, "…which essentially stipulates the following… to explain or identify all UFO sightings."

And, remember that Edward Trapnell, an assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force suggested finding a civilian agency to study the problem and then conclude it the way the Air Force wanted it concluded. One of the stipulations was that the civilian agency had to say some positive things about the Air Force's handling of the UFO question, even though, it is obvious to us, that their handling had been less than adequate.

We see then, after 1953, when the Robertson Panel had "studied" UFOs, and had made their recommendations of stripping the mystery from the phenomenon and of a public education, the emphasis shifted from investigation to explanation. Twist and manipulate the data until it was warped into a position that fit with what the Air Force wanted us to believe. They were the "authorities" on the topic. They had employed the best research techniques. And they had no "secret" information that would lead to other conclusions.

Yet, when we look at the files, those files that they must have believed no one would ever see, we learn that the situation is different than we were told. There were secret studies, some of which concluded that UFOs were extraterrestrial, there were cases in which the solutions were not consistent with the facts, and there were cases in which the Air Force should have investigated but never did.

The Air Force mission, or rather the public mission, was to investigate UFOs. That should mean they would be very interested in the photograph cases. Here was a report where they weren't confined by the eyewitness testimony. There was something that could be measured and analyzed. Here was something they could see. And yet, it seems that they had no real interest in pursuing some of the best of the photographic cases.

On May 11, 1950, Paul Trent, a farmer living near McMillville, Oregon took two photographs of an object that hovered near his house. The pictures of the disc-shaped craft have foreground detail in them. Neither Trent nor his wife attempted to make any money from the pictures. They have been examined time and again by experts. William Hartmann analyzed them for the Condon Committee and wrote, "The is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against fabrication."

Years later, UFO debunker Philip Klass would suggest that shadows under the eaves of the barn "proved" the picture was taken in the morning, rather than the evening, and that proved the case a hoax. Others wrote the shadows off to random light scattering and essentially unimportant.

But the real point here is about a case that even the scientists with the Condon Committee found of sufficient interest that they analyzed the photographs. But not so the Air Force. The Project Blue Book files show that this case is "information" only. It is not a case and doesn't even have an evaluation written after it.

It would seem to me, that if you are charged with determining what the flying saucers are, that if a case came to your attention that had two good photographs to go with it, you would make an effort to learn more. It would seem to me that this sort of a case would be better than all those with single witnesses that the Air Force chased down. It would seem to me that the value of such a case would be higher than those where there is only the testimony of witnesses.

So, where are we then? The Air Force files, contrary to what they would have us believe, are a treasure trove of old cases. We have separated the rumors from the facts by studying the reports as they gathered decades ago. We can learn, just as Menzel suggested that neither Chiles nor Whitted felt the aircraft buffeted by turbulence, though such facts have been presented in the past.

We can learn, that even though the Air Force claimed a solution to the case, that the solution didn't fit the facts. The Minot Air Force Base report showed that.

We can learn that the Air Force, though arguing that UFOs weren't real and that its officers had found no evidence to support any other conclusion, that such wasn't the case. While they claimed all but 701 sightings were identified, we have learned that those eleven thousand plus files might have been labeled, but a good third of them were never identified. It is a subtle but very real difference.

We can learn that controversial cases, such as the Hill abduction, the McMinneville photographs, or the Kelly-Hopkinsville attack, while in the files, were there as "information" only. Why would the Air Force investigators shy away from investigating these cases, but would collect information about them. It is an interesting fact.

We can learn, by studying the cases, that the Air Force officers who knew the truth about what was in the files rarely, if ever, shared it with the general public or the media. Inside, they were making their proclamations, and without access to the data it would be difficult to argue the point. Now, with that data firmly in hand, we can see, time and again, how the officers were less than candid.

We can learn that a true evaluation of the material in the case files has not been done. Here, I have only scratched the surface of what can be found in the files. If someone, or some organization was to undertake a complete, and I think it must be objective, re-evaluation of the files, what is found would be startling. Would the proof that UFOs are alien spacecraft be proved? I don't think so. But, it would certainly be a starting point and would reveal that something strange has been going on.

We can learn that Blue Book was not the final authority on UFO sighting investigations. We can see, from regulation and reports, that other organizations including the CIA, the 4602d AISS, and other military units held responsibility for investigating UFOs. The situation wasn't one of a single entity investigating the sightings, but one of multiple entities often investigating cases without coordinating with one another.

We can learn that Blue Book was not an objective investigation searching for answers, but a military organization with a specific mission. The investigations sometime got in the way of the mission. That was proven when Quintanilla was forced to go to interview the police officers who had chased UFOs.

The arguments from Project Blue Book turn out to be circular. There are no UFOs, therefore we can find no evidence that there are UFOs. Since we found no evidence that there are UFOs, there cannot be UFOs. But all they had to do was study their own files without letting their personal beliefs, or the beliefs of their superiors influencing them. What we have in the Project Blue Book files are dozens of cases that scream for proper scientific scrutiny. That has yet to happen.

What we can learn from the Project Blue Book files is that something very unusual has been happening since June 1947. It has been investigated, analyzed, studied, and considered, and no one has provided a good solution as yet. In fact, by studying these files, it seems that a solid case for the extraterrestrial hypothesis can be made. That surely is not what they wanted, but it's what they got.

Project Blue Book, as well as its predecessors was a sham from the beginning. They went through the motions of gathering the data, they filled reams of paper with meaningless thoughts, and they worked to convince us that there was nothing to flying saucer reports. But when we were allowed to see the evidence, we saw what it showed. Flying saucers do exist, and the best evaluation suggests that they are extraterrestrial in origin. That is what we can learn from Project Blue Book.