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"Our study would be conducted exclusively by "Non Believers". The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that to the public it would appear totally objective study. Conclusion...There is no secrecy and no evidence that such objects even exist."
Memorandum from Robert Low (before the report was started) - Project Administrator CONDON Report to Colorado University V.P. Thurston Marshall
The Condon Report
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The Condon Committee was the informal name of the University of Colorado UFO Project, a study of unidentified flying objects, undertaken at the University of Colorado from 1966 to 1968 under the direction of physicist Edward Condon.
Wiki
Summary of a Talk Presented to the Dupont Chapter of The Scientific Research Society of America (RESA), Wilmington, Delaware, Feb. 12, 1969.
James E. McDonald, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
The Condon Report's negative conclusions and recommendations with respect to scientific study of UFOs are now a matter of public record. I dispute those conclusions, challenging and criticizing them on the following principal grounds:
* The report analyses only about ninety cases, a tiny fraction of the significant and scientifically puzzling UFO reports now on record.
* It omits consideration of some of the most puzzling cases on record, famous cases that persons such as myself specifically urged the Condon Project to study. It even omits discussion of certain significant cases that Project staff actually investigated (e.g. Levelland and Redlands).
* Many of those cases which the Report does consider are of such trivially insignificant nature that they should have been ignored on the grounds that they are unrelated to the Project's prime mission, namely, seeking explanations of the kinds of truly baffling cases that have created the Air Force problem that led to establishment of the Colorado UFO Project [i.e. Condon report].
* Specious argumentation, and argumentation of scientifically very weak nature, abound in the Report's case-analyses. And, while broadly charging bias on the part of those who have taken the UFO problem seriously in the past, the Report exhibits degrees of bias in the opposite direction that deserve the sharpest of criticism.
* To anyone intimately familiar with relevant report-details, some of the cases considered in the Report exhibit disturbingly incomplete presentation of relevant evidence; in a few instances, such defects seem little short of misrepresentation of case-information. However, I believe that the latter instances bespeak bias, not intent to deceive.
* Despite all of the above, those who prepared the Report ended up with about a dozen (i.e., about 15 per cent) of their cases in their "Unexplained" category. Some are extremely significant UFO cases (e.g., Texas B-47 or Lakenheath); yet these Unexplained UFOs appear to have been casually ignored by Condon in recommending that UFOs be considered of no further scientific significance.
* Irrelevant padding has thickened the report to a bulk that will discourage many scientists from studying it carefully. Detailed UFO report-analyses should have been the primary content of this Report, yet trivia and irrelevancies, or secondary material, are present in objectionably voluminous proportions.
* The Report, it must be noted, does exhibit a few bright facets; but these are obscured by its high average defect-density.
* In all, I believe that the contents of the Condon Report fail dismally to support the strong negative recommendations which Condon has presented in his own summary analysis. The strong endorsement by the National Academy of Sciences will, I believe, prove to be a painful embarrassment to the Academy, for it appears to be the epitome of superficial panel-evaluation by representatives of a scientific body that ought always to warrant the prestige its good name enjoys.
"My own estimate is that absolutely no further general progress towards scientific clarification of the UFO problem will come until the inadequacies of the Condon Report are fully aired in as many ways as possible. I intend to devote all possible personal effort to that objective; and NICAP is in process of preparing an extended rebuttal report. So small a fraction of the scientific community is currently aware of the potential scientific importance of the UFO problem that this rebuttal will probably be slow in taking effect; but the Report seems so unrepresentative of good scientific work, so highly vulnerable to scientific criticism, that I believe its negative influence (except with respect to USAF decisions about Project Blue Book) will be quite short-lived".
Link
* Condon Did Not Investigate Cases
Dr. Condon, although he is named in the Air Force contract as the project's principal investigator, did not make a single field investigation. Nor did he interview even one of the hundreds of pilots, astronomers, aerospace engineers, control tower operators, and other highly competent witnesses sent to him by NICAP at Colorado's request.
* Case material ignored
Large volumes of case material was apparently completely ignored,including the deaths of three Air Force pilots involved in UFO chases and a UFO encounter with an Air Force transport captain who said he believed they were "shot at."
* Use of ridicule
Dr. Condon stated that there should be no attack on the integrity of persons having different opinions on UFOs. Yet, he ridiculed UFO witnesses, well-informed scientists on the subject, and NICAP.
* Kook Cases Get Coverage
Dr. Condon takes up considerable space in the report discussing numerous hoaxes and "contactee" trips to Venus but did not include, in his sections, even one strong, responsible case from a good witness.
* Key Witnessess omitted
Among the omissions in the Condon report are the hundreds of detailed UFO sightings by reputable witnesses whose intelligence and credentials make examinations of their reports essential. Without an evaluation of these high-quality UFO cases any conclusions are meaningless.
* Pilots' Sighting Not Included
Reports by scientists were not the only category rejected by project investigators on the basis of their exclusion criteria. There was wholesale elimination of sightings by engineers and other technical personnel, including many airline pilots.
* Reports by Police ignored
Among the omissions are reports by police officers and sheriffs' deputies. In several cases, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials also figured in the reports, such as the one at Redmond, Ore.Other excluded cases in which police officers were involved are the well-known Socorro, N.M. report by Officer Lonnie Zamora, who observed a landed, egg-shaped object which left traces and the equally well-known police report of an 80-mile chase of a UFO from Portage County, Ohio, into Pennsylvania.
* Case Material/Significant Data Omitted
Another major defect of the Colorado Project was the meager use it made of the enormous reservoir of case material available to it. Over the 20 years preceding the project, between 10,000 and 15,000 UFO sighting reports had been recorded. Yet the report treats only 50 cases from this period, or 1/2 of 1% of the available material.
* Credible Witnesses Ignored
undreds of credible witnesses were therefore ignored because "they could not add anything new" to their original reports.
* Secrecy Denied
Dr. Condon denied in the report that there was any evidence of secrecy. NICAP gave him evidence of cases that were withheld, reports whose very existence was denied, and sightings whose conclusions were changed years later.
"Maybe they are misleading us . . ." he stated. "I don't care much."
Rocky Mountain News, November 5, 1966
Link
See 4a
The Condon Report on UFOs
In 1966 the Air Force sponsored a project, directed by University of Colorado physicist Edward U. Condon, to conduct what was billed as an "independent" study. In fact it was part of an elaborate scheme to allow the Air Force, publicly anyway, to get out of the UFO business.
Mary Evans Picture Library:
The official text of the controversial Condon Report, billed in 1969 as the last (and negative) word on UFOs.The Condon committee was to review or reinvestigate Project Blue Book data and decide if further investigation was warranted.As an internal memorandum leaked to Look magazine in 1968 showed, Condon and his chief assistant knew before they started that they were to reach negative conclusions.
Condon sparked a fire storm of controversy when he summarily dismissed two investigators who, not having gotten the message, returned from the field with positive findings. In January 1969, when the committee's final report was released in book form, readers who did not get past Condon's introduction were led to believe that "further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified on the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." Those who bothered to read the book found that fully one-third of the cases examined remained unexplained, and scientist-critics would later note that even some of the "explained" reports were unconvincingly accounted for.
But that did not matter; Condon arid his committee had done their job, and the Air Force closed down Project Blue Book at the end of the year.
Link
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Two stunning new revelations have emerged from the collection of 1,200 pages of files copied by MUFON's Project Pandora from the files of the late Roy Craig, a physical chemist who was a key investigator for the University of Colorado's UFO study. One, it turns out that late in the study a project scientist wrote a memo admitting that more than 50% of their cases had turned out to be unexplained. Two, proof has now been found that project director Edward Condon had not in fact read his own report before writing up the report's "Conclusions and Recommendations," the opening chapter in the front of the report.
Link
Originally posted by Gazrok
Hynek remains as one of the most influential ones to speak about it...after all, he used to be on their team....
Later, he admitted to the mission of basically sweeping it all under the rug. It's people like him that got me to first really dive into the subject...people who used to be involved in the coverup, who then came forward to set the record straight, even in the face of ridicule and loss of academic cred....
"The Air Force had put out a secret order for its pilots to capture UFOs. For the last six months we have been working with a congressional committee investigating official secrecy concerning proof that UFOs are real machines under intelligent..."
Major Donald Keyhoe,during a live TV broadcast on CBS in 1958 in which he was pulled from the air when he began to deviate from the prepared format of the programme.
"Before I began my association with the US Air Force, I had
joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw
at the "psychological postwar craze" for flying saucers
that seemed to be sweeping the country and at the naivete
and gullibility of our fellow human beings who were being
taken in by such obvious "nonsense." It was almost in a
sense of sport that I accepted the invitation to have a
look at the flying saucer reports....."
"I had started out as an outright 'debunker,' taking
great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling
cases. I was the arch enemy of those 'flying saucer
groups and enthusiasts' who very dearly wanted UFOs to be
interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came
almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book
personnel; they were all "crackpots and visionaries.'"
"Now, however, documentation which puts the UFO-
U.S. government controversy in quite a new light has
become available. The authors have made revealing use of
documents released through the mechanism of the Freedom
of Information Act and other data which have been made
available to them, often through private sources, which
show that the CIA and NSA protestations of innocence and
lack of interest in UFOs are nothing short of
prevarication."
"The reader must judge for himself or herself just
how far these implications extend, but certainly no one
can deny any longer that various intelligence agencies of
our government were long cognizant of UFOs and the global
extent of this phenomenon. Official dispatches from our
embassies and air bases in other countries to these
agencies, to the State Department, and even, on occasion,
to the White House, bear incontrovertible witness to
this."
"For the government to continue to maintain that
UFOs are nonexistent in the face of the documents already
released and of other cogent evidence presented in this
book is puerile and in a sense an insult to the American
people."
Dr J Allen Hynek, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University and scientific consultant for Air Force investigations of UFOs from 1948 until 1969 (Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book).
The Condon Report on UFOs
In 1966 the Air Force sponsored a project, directed by University of Colorado physicist Edward U. Condon, to conduct what was billed as an "independent" study. In fact it was part of an elaborate scheme to allow the Air Force, publicly anyway, to get out of the UFO business.
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The Portage County Incident
Drawn by Pat Oliphant then with the Denver Post.
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"Stay calm, Dr Condon--just tell them you don't believe in them!"
"Don't let this get out--it could just ruin our conclusions!"
The late Dr. J. Allen Hynek was professor emeritus and former chairperson of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University. He was associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. from 1956 to 1960, when he was in charge of the U.S. Optical Satellite Tracking Program. Dr. Hynek was scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, the Air Force UFO study, from 1952 to 1969, and in 1973 he founded the Center for UFO studies in Evanston, Illinois.
When the long-awaited Condon Report on Unidentified Flying Objects was issued early this year (1969), it was accompanied by a vitriolic rebuttal. For on that same day Dr. David R. Saunders published his own version of what went on behind the scenes at the University of Colorado, where the project was headquartered under the Directorship of Dr. Edward U. Condon.
The Saunders’ "expose" is titled "UFOs? YES" Its subtitle was,
"Where The Condon Committee Went Wrong/The Inside Story By An Ex-Member Of The Official Study Group."
Dr. Saunders is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado and assistant director of its Department of Testing and Counseling. He holds a Ph.D. (Illinois) in psychology. Yet he was fired from the Project by Dr. Condon for "incompetence" about a year before the scientific UFO study was completed.
Link
"Specious argumentation, and argumentation of scientifically very weak nature, abound in the Report's case-analyses. And, while broadly charging bias on the part of those who have taken the UFO problem seriously in the past, the Report exhibits degrees of bias in the opposite direction that deserve the sharpest of criticism."
Dr James McDonald -Senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics and professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Arizona.
HOW TO "EXPLAIN" UFOS TO THE PUBLIC:
This is an early policy document focused on a strategy for "explaining" UFOs to the public and "working" with the media.
For example:
"...for those times where the object is not explainable, it would be well to advise your people to say something on this order. "The information on this sighting will be analyzed by the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Dayton, Ohio," and leave it at that..."
REFERENCES:
Title: RE: concerning the "Unidentified Flying Object Program"
To: Brigadier General W. M. Burgess, USAF Air Defense Command
Author: Colonel George E. Perry, USAF, Directorate of Intelligence.
Date: 23 December 23, 1953
Classification: CONFIDENTIAL
The Document:
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