The UFO Gap

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010006-5

submit the puzzling phenomenon of the UFOs to a many-sided, careful scientific investigation."

We know enough now about the way the U. S. S. R. announces its scientific advances—the element of surprise the Russians have built into every step of their space program is one example—to guess that a Soviet writer would hardly call for "a many-sided, careful scientific investigation" of a phenomenon unless such an investigation were already going on.

Late last summer, the Chicago SunTimes ended its story about the discovery by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist—of very puzzling narrowband radio signals from space with the sentence, "Reportedly, Soviet scientists have also been active in such searches." Highly directional, single-frequency radio signals, of course, might be remarkable evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Zigel's discussion of UFOs in Cmena considers five theories about their nature. The fifth theory—that UFOs are "flying apparatus of other planets, investigating the earth"—is the only one of the five to which he offers no objections.

In sum, what little "hard" information I have—and my intuition—tells me that the U.S.S.R. may have been studying UFOs with dispassionate thoroughness for years. From my own official involvement, I know that the United States is only now beginning to consider treating the problem seriously.

In 1948, I was asked by the U.S. Air Force to serve as a scientific consultant on the increasing number of reports of strange lights in the sky. I was then director of the astronomical observatory of Ohio State University and am now the chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern. I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense. For the first few months of my association with what is now Project Blue Book—the name of the very small office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, concerned with UFOs—I had no reason to change this opinion. The reports of sightings that came to our attention then were either identifiable flying objects (IFOs), such as weather balloons, meteors or planes, or they came to us from patently unreliable witnesses. A few others were hoaxes.

But over the years, cases began to accumulate for which I could find no satisfactory physical explanation. In fairness to Project Blue Book, I can say that nearly all of the cases that I consider unsolved have remained so labeled in Air Force files, despite charges by critics that the Project always found an explanation for a report. On the other hand, the Project did acquire the habit of subtly modifying its disposition of particular cases over a period of time. A sighting that the evaluator had said was "possibly" traceable to conventional aircraft at the

time it occurred would appear in the Project's annual report as "probably" traceable to conventional aircraft. More important than such small distortions, however, is the fact that the WrightPatterson group usually consisted only of a captain, who headed the team, one other officer, a sergeant and myself, as occasional consultant. The fact that the commanding officer was a captain indicates the extent of the Air Force's concern for this investigation.

My complaint here is not primarily against the Air Force—which, after all, is not a scientific investigative agency. But, under the aegis of the Air Force or not, there should have been a large, well-staffed UFO research group in this country since the first waves of reports.

In the past 20 years, I have analyzed more than 15,000 reports of UFO sightings. About 90 percent of these turned out, on quick inspection, not to have been UFOs at all, but readily identifiable objects. Of the remaining 10 percent, I made a further division in my mind between those that came to me from reasonably reliable observers—about 70 percent—and those that came from oddballs of one stripe or another. What this means is that there are at least 1000 UFO reports that remain completely unresolved in my own mind. As a scientist, 1000 perplexing cases strike me as significant enough to warrant professional and thorough investigation. I frankly do not know why the Government has been so slow in coming to the same conclusion.

The popular attitude among scientists in the late Forties was that UFOs were a product of what some called "post-War nerves." Of course, when reports of the sightings continued well into the Fifties and began to arrive from many regions of the globe—this theory was out. Unfortunately, the attitude that accompanied the theory was retained. How many UFO reports there might have been if the popular and academic attitude toward UFOs were one of neutral inquiry instead of derision will never be known. Even an Air Force major general does not want to be laughed at by an Ivy League professor.

One reason the professors were so contemptuous of the reports was that UFOs, obviously, cannot be studied in the laboratory. Results that can be verified through repeatable, quantitative laboratory experiments are still considered the essence of science. What must be remembered is that much of our accurate, scientific knowledge about the universe was not gathered or verified in laboratories—and cannot be. We know much less about tornadoes than we would if we could whip one up whenever we wanted it; but we certainly accept the fact that they exist and, in fact, have some universally accepted theories about their formation, composition and behavior. That information is the result of unscheduled

observation. Similarly, many accepted findings in zoology—our ideas about social structure among wild lions, for example—could come only from patient observation in the field. With UFOs—as with tornadoes, sunspots, animals in their wild state and a host of other aspects of the world—the scientist must mount an attack to suit the phenomena. To select phenomena that meet the demands of laboratory research leads to error in many fields and is impossible with UFOs.

The existing evidence may indicate a possible connection with extraterrestrial life, the probable existence of which is generally accepted. If such life does exist and if there is any possibility of establishing communication with it, our scientific knowledge of that life might even be critical to our survival. Now let us be clear: The existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and the UFO phenomenon may be two entirely different things. But the latter, in itself, poses an interesting scientific problem. How can it be studied? Do we ignore it simply because the evidence we have does not follow the strict rules of scientific evidence?

The question now is not whether but how to design a truly scientific approach to the UFO problem. When the Air Force last year appointed a special commission to study the UFO problem—the so-called Condon committee, meeting at the University of Colorado and named for its chairman, Dr. Edward Condon—it tacitly recognized the seriousness of the problem. I trust I will not seem to be trespassing on the committee's territory if I outline here a scheme that I think would be a thorough and efficient way to obtain scientific knowledge of UFOs.

Let us suppose we have before us 5000 UFO reports. We appoint two scientific panels, one composed of physical scientists, the other of social scientists. We ask the first panel to examine the reports and assign to each a "strangeness index," $ \Sigma $ , on a scale of 1 to 5. By "strangeness" we shall mean the difficulty in ascribing a simple scientific explanation for the report, taken at face value. An attempt shall be made by the scientific panel to evaluate the strangeness of the report. Given the report as is, how difficult is it to find a natural, normal explanation for it?

Thus, $ \Sigma1 $ and $ \Sigma2 $ would refer to UFO reports that, even though taken at face value, nonetheless find a ready explanation. They can then be excluded from further consideration. They are IFOs rather than UFOs. Here are a few examples of IFOs: In May 1953, in a small town in Wisconsin, a group of solid citizens excitedly reported that for several nights running, just before sunrise, a bright object, "much too bright to be a star," appeared in the East and "remained there, getting slowly higher and higher (continued on page 267)

Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010006-5