Documents / Document
This Black Vault compilation contains a September 1997 reply from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense to John Greenewald's FOIA request, enclosing its UFO records. The enclosures include a Navy information sheet dismissing the Philadelphia Experiment and an Air Force UFO fact sheet listing 12,618 Project Blue Book sightings, 701 of them unidentified. They also include the National Academy of Sciences review endorsing the University of Colorado report and the concluding pages of a 1994 Air Force Roswell report attributing the wreckage to Project MOGUL.
“O'Brien”1 page
tne nills•dt wnere tne Starlight eQuipment is mounted . Wh•te-clad UFO watchers oaooo~o tne•r tecnn•cal tasks am1d tne fumes ot sulfur bombs. They watch a sky ' ' airpta nes. meteors. satellites. k1tes. "'S, b~rds. ball hghtnrng . migrating . ulown sprders. and maybe, just maybe. sometntng else . But. as Starlight project director Ray Stanford told col- leagues at a 1976 UFO conference, "If we search for ten years wrth what we·ve got and we don't find anything, then we're go- ing to have to admit that nothing is there.· One ot tr.e most visible aspects ot the phenomenon is a growing collection of UFO photographS. White the vast majority of UFO sighting reports are made by hon- est. perplexed. often reluctant witnesses, most photographs are hoaxes. To sepa- rate out the possibly authent•c photos, if any at all. expens liSe photoanatysis For example. Dr. Bruce Maccabee. are- searcher for the National Investigations Comminee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). has made densrtometric scans of a fa- mous 1950 photo from McMinnville. Ore- gon. The scans support the skeptical "Condon Comminee- conclusion that the photo could in fact be of a large structured disk SO feet or more in diameter. But an- other expert, computer specialist Robert Sheaffer, concluded that the photo was made w•th a smudged tens and that the obiect appears to be hanging from an !!.. 1 ead power line. Condon Commrnee igators tater changed their minds Q ..... agreed w•th Sheaffer. Specialists at the "Ground Saucer Watch·(GSW) office in Phoenix also apply advanced data processing techniQues to photographs. Their work has raised howls . of protest from traditional UFO groups be- cause many of the more famous photos have been denounced by GSW as frauds. However. GSW has compiled a small list of photos that they suggest could be genu- ine. Aga1n, other researchers c•sagree. and sc1entii1C debate •s r ag t r. ~ ontne va· lidity ot such process•ng tecr-.:-.• c;ues . Computer sctenltsts have a ravonte proverb: "Garbage 1n, garoa;e out: It means that bad input data Cc!1 be manipu- lated to produce nearly any output de· sired, but it will be useless. That. so tar. seems to be the late of UFO computenzed data banks, since data processing spe- cialists have crrticized them for not having sufficient control over the validity of input data. UFO proponents, appealing to math· emalical formulas from information theory, claim that a proper computer program can filter out ttle garbage and s!tt through to the authentic residue. Nor have laboratories produced any spec1men that could not have been ob- tained from ordinary sources on earth. Ex- otic space metals or artifacts continue to oe reported. but none have passed the in- vestigat!on of professional laboratories. Yet these debates have changed mark· edty from the days when UFOs were the topic for screwball religious cults. nasty in- sinuations about witnesses· sanity and/or sobriety. and knee-jerk gullibility. Today's arguments must stand up to ttle time- tested standards of scientific research. Perhaps they will reveal something, per- haps not. But it's the only way to find out for sure. • • • In Ught of the need for better scientific research about UFOs. it is particularly frustrating to read published reports that "NASA has re,ected a White House re- Quest to reopen the government- sponsored research program. - But the real story is not so open-and-shut as these pessimistic accounts would indicate. AcbJally, the story began wnen Presi- dent Caner prom1sed to release all UFO data, if elected. Once elected. he discov- UFO e•cens gNe •rtte benefiC of tt1e douor· to rltis Yvngay. Peru pfloto aMI t::le!ieve 1t ~enuine . 30 OMNI • ereo mat me A11 Forces ·a:ue Book· f•les were arreacy be•ng cecrass •f•eo. and ev- erybody den1ed hav•ng any other tiles. ·carter's sc•ence adviser. Dr. Frank Press. was ass•gned the task of answer•ng UFO- relatec mail trom the public. A flOOd of ma11 arrived, demanding that tne ·real secret riles- be released . Overwhelmed with Queries. Press asked NASA director Or. Robert Frosch if NASA might handle the mail. tn the lener. one paragraph innocently asked if NASA would consider convening a panel to de- cide if a new official investigation was war- ranted. Following several months of consider- ation. NASA sa1d that it could see no rea- son to undertake'a new investigation. However. Frosch offered to make NASA laborato"ies available to analyze any UFO "physical evidence· that might be submitted. Six months later, nothing has been offi· cially submitted. .. - If UFOs are alien spacecraft (and while this is the leading theory. many other schools of thought have come and gone). it's likely that eanh's spaceships may have been able to encounter ttlem in outer space. Stories have sprung up about how "our astronauts have seen them tool" In tact. each story can be traced back to authors' misunderstandings, distortions, exaggerations. or just plain fabrications. There does not appear to be a single case on record of Amerrcan or Soviet spacemen encountering anything extraordinary in tetn:ls of normal space occurrences. Ttie mos1 famous case. hOwever, con- tinues to thrive. It deals w1th a UFO seen by astronaut James McDivitt on the Gem•ni-4 mission in June l96S. McDivitt insists that the beer-can shaped object was just another man-made satellite, but some observers have suggested that it was a glimpse of his own booster rocket in a nearby orbit. A "tadpole" photograph was released by NASA soon after the llight, taken from a series of mQYie frames. McDivitt claims he shot a few exposures with two still cam- eras. but they did not turn out. He didn't touch the movie camera. and the blob of light released by an overeager photo t~h· nician shows only a window relleclion. he insists. APRO's Dr. Harder. however. insists that ttle "tadpole" really was the UFO. despite what McOi\litt thinks. and that it was being propelled by a plaSma jet. Or. Harder chooses to disregard the astronaut's testi· mony and burld his case on a few frames of reflections. UFO believers can onty hope that most UFO ev1dence is not so in- substantial. ••• Positive prool of a genu•ne UFO encounter
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 134 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.