The Need for a Guide

On November 2, 1957, at about 10:00 p.m. -- long before the world at large knew of it -- the Soviets launched their second dog-carrying Sputnik. An hour later, on the flat plains of the Texas panhandle, near the otherwise unremarkable town of Levelland, ranch hands Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz encountered something that forever changed their lives.

According to Saucedo's signed statement, "I was traveling north and west on Route 116, driving my truck. At about four miles out of Levelland, I saw a big flame, to my right front. I thought it was lightning." The white and yellow torpedo-shaped object, Saucedo went on to say, apparently made his truck's motor stop and the headlights fail. Traveling at some 600 to 800 miles an hour, he estimated, the object generated so much heat he "had to hit the ground."

Over the next two hours, Patrolman A. J. Fowler would receive at least a dozen more calls, all of them from independent witnesses reporting much the same thing. For instance, at 12:05 a.m., a 19-year-old Texas Tech freshman said he was driving his car nine miles east of Levelland when the motor suddenly "started cutting out like it was out of gas." The headlights dimmed, then went out altogether after the car rolled to a stop. The student raised the hood but could find nothing obviously wrong with the engine or electrical wiring. Returning to the driver's seat, he now noticed an egg-shaped object, flat on the bottom, sitting astride the highway in front of him. It glowed bluish-green, he reported, and looked to be 125 feet long and made of an aluminum-like material with no visible details or markings. Frightened, he tried turning the motor over again, but the car would not start. Shortly, the UFO rose "almost straight up," disappearing "in a split instant." He tried the ignition again; the car started, and the lights came on, and he drove home, although he did not report the incident to Fowler -- "for fear of ridicule" -- until the following afternoon, after his parents told him he should.

Nationwide, the Levelland sightings garnered almost as much press attention as the new Soviet satellite, eventually forcing the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book to send an investigator to the site. (Project Blue Book, first under the auspices of the Air Technical Intelligence Center, or ATIC, and later run out of the Foreign Technology Division, was the official U.S. Air Force agency charged with investigating UFOs. Its immediate predecessors, also associated with the air force, were Project Sign and Project Grudge.) According to the now-deceased astronomer J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University, then Project Blue Book's scientific consultant, the Levelland investigation, conducted by a member of the 1006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS) was cursory at best. Writing in his now-classic book, The UFO Experience (Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1972), Hynek states, "I was told that the Blue Book investigation consisted of the appearance of one man in civilian clothes at the sheriff's office at about 11:45 a.m. on November 5; he made two auto excursions during the day and then told Sheriff Clem that he was finished."

According to Temple University historian David Jacobs, author of another classic volume, The UFO Controversy in America (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1975), "the officer failed to interview nine of the fifteen witnesses and also erroneously stated that lightning had been in the area at the time of the sightings." Indeed, the air force and Project Blue Book ultimately attributed the incidents to "weather phenomenon of [an] electrical nature, generally classified as `ball lightning' or `St. Elmo's fire,' caused by stormy conditions in the area, including mist, rain, thunderstorms, and lightning." The engine stalls and headlight failures? "Wet electrical circuits," said the air force. "Privately," Jacobs observes, "Blue Book officers believed the Levelland sightings were obviously an example of mass suggestion."

The upshot of the ball lightning pronouncement was an angry spate of criticisms by editorial writers and the growing legion of civilian UFO organizations, charging the air force with ignorance or incompetence at best and a purposeful cover-up of the UFO phenomenon at worst. The outrage was exacerbated when 500 more UFO cases poured into Project Blue Book over the next couple of months, making it the most explosive UFO year since 1952.

In response to all the brouhaha, the air force launched an investigation of its own UFO operation. The recommendation? That some 20 men be assigned to a UFO detail. What's more, suggested the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where the study was done, the air force would do well to create a standard UFO kit containing an operating procedure manual and other tools necessary for investigating the mysterious, alleged craft. That way, when the 20 UFO experts went out on assignment, there would be no more foolish errors. They'd know what to do.

The report also recommended that the air force investigate press reports and not just those reaching Project Blue Book through direct channels, including air force pilots or radar operators. It was assumed that such actions might deflect civilian criticism and at the same time drastically reduce the number of reports classified "unknown" or "insufficient data." Indeed, as of November 1958, these two categories were accounting for 20 percent of all UFO reports received to date.

Unfortunately, the staff recommendations were never implemented. The notion of a UFO tool kit was quickly quashed, along with any idea of a rapid deployment team. Instead, Project Blue Book limped along much as it had before, understaffed and underfunded. Press clippings were stuffed into boxes and later thrown away. Letters and reports from the general public generally went unanswered and uninvestigated.

Even so, from the summer of 1947 until December 19, 1969, air force representatives amassed 12,618 official case reports of UFOs, defined by the air force as "any aerial object or phenomenon which the observer is unable to identify." (Hynek would later amend the definition of a UFO to refer to any flying objects which "remain unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making a common-sense identification, if one is possible.") Of the 12,000-plus cases studied, 701, or almost 6 percent, were classified "unknown."

Those cases that were investigated -- like Levelland -- were typically looked into lackadaisically when they were looked into at all. The air force also indulged in a little creative bookkeeping. Those cases classified as "probable" or "insufficient data" were counted on the solved side of the ledger instead of the unsolved side, skewing the percentage of true unknowns. A growing number of critics contended that, far from being an investigative agency, Project Blue Book amounted to little more than a public relations ploy, one designed to downplay the phenomenon's prevalence and possible importance.

Even Hynek himself was ultimately disillusioned by his experience as scientific consultant. "I can safely say that the whole time I was with the Air Force, we never had anything that resembled a really good scientific dialogue on the subject," he said shortly before his death in 1986.

Project Blue Book's death knell was sounded in the spring of 1966, in the wake of another air force boondoggle. At a press conference in March of that year, Hynek attributed some intriguing Michigan sightings to "swamp gas" -- the spontaneous ignition of methane. The resulting editorial uproar pictured the air force team more as buffoons than villains. If the ball lightning and mass hysteria explanation of almost a decade earlier had been the first straw in the public's negative perception of the air force's handling of UFO investigations, swamp gas was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Before the decade was up, the air force would be out of the UFO business for good. One driving force: a controversial University of Colorado study directed by physicist Edward U. Condon. Condon's largely negative report summary concluded that chasing UFOs was a waste of time. Indeed, UFOs seemed shrouded in secrecy, Condon declared, only because the air force resisted "premature publication of incomplete studies of reports."

Thrilled by Condon's publicized pronouncements -- few reporters were about to wade through a 965-page report in search of any UFO gems -- the air force seized the offered brass ring. On December 17, 1969, in the wake of the Colorado/Condon study, Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans, Jr., announced the closure of Project Blue Book, saying that its continuance "cannot be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science."

Hynek was one of several scientists who saw the situation differently. "When the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes," he said, "I believe that it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and totally unexpected quantum jump."

With the air force out of the picture since 1969, the burden of investigating the UFO phenomenon has largely fallen on the shoulders of individuals and a handful of civilian UFO organizations. Although individuals are hardly hampered by bureaucratic rules, public relations considerations, and other policy requirements, they can only do so much on their own. Moreover, the weight of their public pronouncements is linked, directly or indirectly, to their personal and professional credentials. It's one thing for an established astronomer, such as Hynek, to speak out about the phenomenon in general; it's another thing altogether for, say, an advertising executive or fast-food clerk to claim that Earth is being invaded by genetic engineers from another planet or galaxy.

The same is also true of UFO organizations, which are only as good and efficient as their collective members. One overripe member may not spoil the whole barrel, but he or she can certainly detract from the overall respectability of the subject by making unbridled comments about what the UFO phenomenon ultimately means. As Hynek and others have been quick to point out, the U in UFO stands for "Unidentified," not necessarily for extraterrestrial spaceships and alien abductors in that order. All three may or may not be related. Some UFOs, however, are almost certainly unrecognized or little understood natural phenomena, swamp gas and ball lightning very possibly included.

The one undeniable truth about the UFO phenomenon -- air force pronouncements aside -- is that further investigation is still required. According to one Gallup Poll, some 15 million adult Americans have at one time or another in their lives witnessed what they believed to be a UFO. Compare that figure with the 12,618 UFO reports the air force collected over 22 years, extrapolate it worldwide, and it's painfully clear that the UFO phenomenon is both the most prevalent and the most underreported anomalous phenomenon of this or any other century. Even if UFOs aren't three-dimensional, solid, physical objects, any student of human psychology or sociology worth his or her salt should be suitably intrigued as to why humans continue to report UFOs in vast numbers in the absence of any unusual stimuli. To say that the best interests of science will not be served by further study of the UFO phenomenon -- in all its myriad, mysterious manifestations -- is to say that science should concern itself only with things humans don't do, because one of the things they do do is report UFOs -- even in the face of peer and public ridicule. If human behavior isn't of scientific interest, then we might as well drop the soft science disciplines of anthropology, perceptual psychology, and social interaction from the academic curriculum.