Condon Committee

Ikwipedia

Condon Committee

University of Colorado UFO Project

Not to be confused with

Project Condign

.

File:CondonReportJacket.jpgMass-market paperback edition of the Condon Report, published by New York Times/Bantam Books (January 1969), 965 pages.

The Condon Committee was the informal name of the University of Colorado UFO Project, a study of UFO cases funded by the United States Air Force from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Colorado under the direction of physicist Edward Condon. Its final report, formally titled Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects and widely known as the Condon Report, was delivered in November 1968 and released in January 1969. The report's introductory "Conclusions and Recommendations," authored by Condon, officially concluded that UFO study offered no scientific value and recommended against further government investigation, directly preceding the closure of Project Blue Book in December 1969. In the UAP disclosure movement, the committee and its report are routinely cited as the pivotal institutional act of scientifically credentialed cover-up: a study whose public conclusions allegedly contradicted its own internal findings.

Background

Beginning in 1947 with Project Sign, which then became Project Grudge and finally Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force conducted formal studies of UFOs. By the 1960s, Blue Book had come under increasing criticism from politicians, newspaper writers, UFO researchers, scientists and members of the public, who alleged that it was conducting shoddy, unsupported research or perpetrating a cover up. The Air Force did not want to continue its studies but did not want a cessation to provoke additional cover-up charges, and no other government agency was willing to take on further UFO studies.

The study was triggered in part by public pressure following the 1966 wave of UFO sightings — including the Wanaque Reservoir sightings and the Swamp Gas incident in Michigan — and a subsequent 1966 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee. J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force's scientific consultant for Project Blue Book, famously offered the "swamp gas" explanation for the Michigan sightings, which generated public ridicule and congressional attention. Hynek had previously written to the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (AFSAB) suggesting a panel re-examine Blue Book; the AFSAB's one-day committee, chaired by Brian O'Brien in February 1966, recommended that the Air Force work "with a few selected universities to provide scientific teams" to study UFOs, with about 100 well-documented sightings studied annually and about 10 man-days devoted to each case.

At a congressional UFO hearing on April 5, 1966, Air Force Secretary Harold Brown defended the Air Force's UFO studies and repeated the O'Brien Committee's call for more studies. Hynek repeated his call for "a civilian panel of physical and social scientists" to "examine the UFO problem critically for the express purpose of determining whether a major problem exists." Shortly after the hearing, the Air Force announced it was seeking universities to undertake a UFO study. Both Hynek and atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald suggested their own campuses (Northwestern University and the University of Arizona); others suggested astronomer Donald Menzel. All were judged too closely allied with one position or another. Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill all declined. Walter Orr Roberts, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Menzel ultimately suggested physicist Edward Condon of the University of Colorado.

Formation of the Condon Committee

In the summer of 1966, Condon agreed to consider the Air Force's offer. He was among the best known and most distinguished scientists of his time, and his tenacious encounters with the House Unamerican Activities Committee and other government Loyalty Boards in the 1940s and 1950s made him "almost legendary" among fellow scientists. On Condon's behalf, Robert J. Low, an assistant dean of the university's graduate program, explored faculty reaction to the proposed project and found it mixed and wary. Low told the Denver Post that the project had met the university's acceptance threshold by the narrowest of margins and was accepted largely because it was difficult to say no to the Air Force. The Air Force initially offered $313,000 for the project; total funding later rose above $500,000.

On October 6, 1966, the University of Colorado agreed to undertake the UFO study, with Condon as director, Low as coordinator, and Stuart W. Cook, Franklin E. Roach, David R. Saunders, and William A. Scott as principal or co-principal investigators. Other committee members included astronomer William K. Hartmann; psychologists Michael Wertheimer, Dan Culbertson and graduate student James Wadsworth; chemist Roy Craig; electrical engineer Norman Levine; and physicist Frederick Ayer. Hynek characterized Condon's perspective towards UFOs as "basically negative," but assumed that his opinions would change once he familiarized himself with evidence. NICAP's Donald Keyhoe was publicly supportive, but privately expressed fears that the Air Force would be controlling things from behind the scenes. The Nation commented: "If Dr. Condon and his associates come up with anything less than the little green men from Mars, they will be crucified."

In November 1966, retired USMC Major Donald Keyhoe and Richard H. Hall, both of NICAP, briefed the panel and agreed to share NICAP's research files. The committee also secured help from the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). The committee moved slowly, hampered by disagreements about the use of funds and methodology, and by the fact that the staff had been deliberately hired with no prior position on UFOs and therefore lacked subject-matter expertise. One committee member suggested filming UFOs using stereo cameras mounted with diffraction gratings in order to study the spectrum of light emitted by UFOs — an approach attempted some fifteen years earlier following a 1954 suggestion by Joseph Kaplan, but quickly judged impractical. Individual members embraced diverse approaches, especially with respect to the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

In late January 1967, Condon stated in a lecture that he thought the government should not study UFOs because the subject was "nonsense," adding, "but I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year." One NICAP member resigned in protest, and Saunders confronted Condon to express concern that NICAP's withdrawal would damage the project.

The "trick" memo

Before the study was complete, a leaked internal memo written in August 1966 by project coordinator Robert Low became a central scandal. The memo, written before any case investigation had begun, reassured two University of Colorado administrators that the study could be structured to appear objective while producing a predetermined negative conclusion:

"Our study would be conducted almost entirely by non-believers who, though they couldn't possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of thick evidence that there is no reality to the observations. 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 July 1967, James E. McDonald learned from a committee member about the memo, located a copy in the project's open files, and wrote to Condon quoting a few lines from it. Investigators David Saunders and Norman Levine — who had independently discovered the memo — were subsequently fired by Condon. On April 30, 1968, NICAP severed its ties with the committee and Keyhoe circulated copies of Low's memo. Press coverage included an article, "Flying Saucer Fiasco" by John G. Fuller in the May 1968 issue of Look, which presented interviews with Saunders and Levine and described the project as a "$500,000 trick." Condon responded that the article contained "falsehoods and misrepresentations." Industrial Research reprinted Low's memo; Scientific Research interviewed Saunders and Levine, who said Condon had used an "unscientific approach" and were considering a libel suit against him for terminating them for alleged "incompetence." Condon in turn threatened to sue. When Science (the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) covered the controversy, Condon first promised an interview, then declined, and resigned from the AAAS in protest when the article was published without his input. Congressional Representative J. Edward Roush said the Look article raised "grave doubts as to the scientific profundity and objectivity of the project," asked the General Accounting Office to investigate (it declined), and held a hearing dominated by critics of the project; Roush later joined the board of NICAP. Low resigned from the project in May 1968.

The memo's existence — confirming, critics argued, that the study had been designed to reach a negative conclusion regardless of evidence — became the primary reason skeptics within the scientific community refused to accept the report's conclusions. Some later critics saw less reason to make much of the memo: committee member David Saunders himself wrote that "to present Low as a plotter or conspirator is unfair and hardly accurate," Hynek wrote that Low "wanted his university to get the contract…and to convince the university administration that they should take it," and project investigator Roy Craig later wrote that the memo had not troubled him because Condon had not known of it for eighteen months. Condon wrote in the Final Report that the memo's characterization of the project showed "how completely Low misunderstood the project when he wrote the memo."

Final months and competing publication

Despite NICAP's withdrawal, members of its Early Warning Network continued to report sightings to investigators, as did journalists. Scientists who anticipated the committee would recommend against continued UFO research rushed their own refutation into print in advance: UFO's? Yes!, written by Saunders, questioned whether the CIA wanted to divert public attention from UFOs and used three cases to argue for extraterrestrial activity. Roy Craig later described each of the three cases as "utter nonsense," "highly suspect," and unexplained but very weak.

The report

The committee delivered its report to the Air Force in November 1968, which released it in January 1969. The Report, 1,485 pages in hardcover and 965 pages in paperback, divided UFO cases into five categories: old reports from before the committee convened, new reports, photographic cases, radar/visual cases, and UFOs reported by astronauts. Condon authored 6 pages of "conclusions and recommendations," a 43-page "summary," and a 50-page history of UFO phenomena and research over the preceding twenty years. In his introductory "Conclusions and Recommendations," Condon wrote: "Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." He also recommended against the creation of a government program to investigate UFO reports.

The Report detailed 59 case studies, though for legal reasons their locations were changed. New York Times science editor Walter Sullivan, in his introduction to the published version, wrote that the series "reads like a modern, real-life collection of Sherlock Holmes episodes. The cases range from the eerily perplexing to the preposterously naive." Six chapters covered field studies of physical evidence such as electromagnetic effects and visual and radar images; one treated the observations of U.S. astronauts. Notably, in Case 2 in Section IV, Chapter 2, the report said of the 1956 Lakenheath-Bentwaters incident: "In conclusion, although conventional or natural explanations certainly cannot be ruled out, the probability of such seems low in this case and the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appears to be fairly high." Even before the report was completed, the Air Force had asked the National Academy of Sciences to "provide an independent assessment of the scope, the methodology, and the findings" of the committee. A panel chaired by Yale astronomer Gerald M. Clemence studied the Report for six weeks and concluded that "on the basis of present knowledge the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings."

Internal contradiction

Hal Puthoff has described the report's central anomaly: the body allegedly documented numerous unexplained cases and provided substantial evidential support for the reality of the phenomenon — while Condon's personal foreword dismissed the entire subject. "If you read it," Puthoff told Joe Rogan, "there's a deep report showing all kinds of reasons why this is real. And then there's the foreword, which most media read, in which he said, 'Oh, nothing here, don't worry about it.'" Of the roughly 90 cases studied, a significant percentage — estimates range from one-quarter to one-third — were reportedly assessed by the investigators themselves as unexplained by any conventional phenomenon. Condon's summary and foreword treated the residue of unexplained cases as insufficient to warrant continued investigation, a logical inversion that critics including James E. McDonald attacked as scientifically indefensible.

Roger Stankovic, MUFON's Australia-New Zealand director, described Condon in similar terms: "Benjamin Condon was the guy who actually was spearheading the analysis of the actual Project Blue Book, and he was a bit of a debunker. And after being commissioned to actually analyze Project Blue Book, after several years of analyzing UFOs, he closed it down saying that there was nothing to this phenomenon."

Reception

The Report earned a mixed reception from scientists and academic journals but "almost universal praise from the news media." Science (AAAS) said: "The Colorado Study is unquestionably the most thorough and sophisticated investigation of the nebulous UFO phenomenon ever conducted." The March 8, 1969 issue of Nature offered a generally positive review but questioned why so much effort had been expended on such a subject: "The Colorado project is a monumental achievement, but one of perhaps misapplied ingenuity… it is more like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, except that the nuts will be quite immune to its impact." On January 8, 1969, the New York Times headlined its coverage: "U.F.O. Finding: No Visits From Afar."

Critics made their case repeatedly without obtaining the government support they sought. One described the Report as "a rather unorganized compilation of independent articles on disparate subjects, a minority of which dealt with UFOs." Hynek likewise described the Report as "a voluminous, rambling, poorly organized" document and wrote that "less than half…was addressed to the investigation of UFO reports." In the April 14, 1969 issue of Scientific Research, Robert L. M. Baker, Jr. wrote that the Report "seems to justify scientific investigation along many general and specialized frontiers." In the December 1969 issue of Physics Today, committee consultant Gerald Rothberg wrote that he had thoroughly investigated about 100 UFO cases, three or four of which left him puzzled, and thought that this "residue of unexplained reports [indicated a] legitimate scientific controversy." In a 1969 issue of the American Journal of Physics, astronomer Thornton Page — a former member of the Robertson Panel — wrote that "Intelligent laymen can (and do) point out the logical flaw in Condon's conclusion based on a statistically small (and selected) sample. Even in this sample a consistent pattern can be recognized; it is ignored by the 'authorities,' who then compound their 'felony' by recommending that no further observational data be collected." In November 1970, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics generally agreed that little of value had been uncovered, but "did not find a basis in the report for [Condon's] prediction that nothing of scientific value will come of further studies."

In December 1969, James E. McDonald called the Report "inadequate" and said "it represents an examination of only a tiny fraction of the most puzzling UFO reports of the past two decades, and that its level of scientific argumentation is wholly unsatisfactory." Astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock, who in 1987 called the Condon Report "the most influential public document concerning the scientific status of this UFO problem," observed that "critical reviews…came from scientists who had actually carried out research in the UFO area, while the laudatory reviews came from scientists who had not carried out such research."

J. Allen Hynek's critique

J. Allen Hynek, who had served as the Air Force's scientific consultant throughout the Project Blue Book years, was openly critical of the Condon Report. Having begun his tenure as a skeptic tasked with explaining away sightings, Hynek had progressively become convinced that the phenomenon was real — and that the Condon Report represented a missed opportunity. He wrote that "The Condon Report settled nothing," called Condon's introduction "singularly slanted," and argued that it "avoided mentioning that there was embedded within the bowels of the report a remaining mystery; that the committee had been unable to furnish adequate explanations for more than a quarter of the cases examined." Hynek contended that "Condon did not understand the nature and scope of the problem" and objected to the idea that only extraterrestrial life could explain UFO activity; by focusing on this hypothesis, he wrote, the Report "did not try to establish whether UFOs really constituted a problem for the scientist, whether physical or social." Hynek went on to found the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in 1973, explicitly to continue the scientific investigation that the Condon Report had officially terminated. His Close Encounter classification system — including Close Encounters of the Third Kind — became the dominant taxonomy for categorizing UAP-entity interactions.

Termination of Project Blue Book

In response to the Report's findings, the Air Force officially closed Project Blue Book — established in March 1952 — on December 17, 1969, publicly declaring the government's UFO investigation permanently concluded. From 1969 until 2017 — the period between the Condon Report and the New York Times revelation of AATIP — there was no publicly acknowledged U.S. government investigation of the UFO/UAP phenomenon. This 48-year gap is described in UAP disclosure research as the "dark age" of institutional dismissal engineered largely by the Condon Report's public reception.

AATIP as de facto successor

Hal Puthoff and other insiders allegedly describe AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) and its predecessor AAWSAP — both classified programs running from 2008 into the 2010s — as essentially constituting the secret successor to the public investigation the Condon Report terminated. According to Puthoff, the program operated under non-descriptive cover funding language specifically to avoid the public and congressional scrutiny that had hobbled Blue Book: "When the funding dried up, it dried up for the reasons you might think of. It was so highly classified that when congressional statements came down that, okay, we need so much money for this — it didn't actually describe it, it would just say 'advanced propulsion and all that kind of stuff.'" In this interpretation, the Condon Report did not end government interest in UAPs — it merely drove that interest entirely underground and out of public accountability.

Robert Wood and the alleged exclusion of dissenting evidence

Steven Greer has cited the testimony of Dr. Robert Wood, a McDonnell Douglas physicist, who reportedly stated that Professor Condon actively prevented him from serving on the committee because Wood possessed "dispositive proof and evidence" that would have allegedly contradicted the predetermined conclusion. Greer further stated that CIA documents released to him after his 1993 briefing of the CIA director purportedly proved that Condon was "on the payroll of the CIA and was there to be sure" the committee reached a negative conclusion.

Intelligence community assessments

Former CIA Senior Intelligence Service officer Jim Semivan, co-founder of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, has assessed the Condon Report as "a total whitewash," arguing that "there's no way that the Air Force or the intelligence community is going to give up on something like this" — and that official disengagement following the report was allegedly performative rather than genuine.

Legacy

The Condon Committee's report remains a central document in the institutional history of UFO research. Its combination of scientific credentialing, what critics allege was a predetermined negative conclusion, and near-total media acceptance of the foreword while largely ignoring the contradictory body text established a template that subsequent debunking efforts have been said to follow. In UAP disclosure research, it is cited alongside the Robertson Panel (1953) as evidence of what proponents describe as a deliberate, multi-decade government strategy to use academic and scientific institutions as tools for public inoculation against taking the UAP phenomenon seriously.

See also

Sources

References

Official government investigations (list) of UFOs by the United Statesvte
Programs
Project Grudge · Project Blue Book · Condon Committee · Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
Category (nested under United States government responses to UFOs)