The UFO Gap

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

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

understanding of statistics and probability as to think that one person can have dozens of UFO sightings while a great many other people (indeed, the majority) have never in their lives seen anything resembling a UFO, can be identified at once as utterly unreliable. When we get the combination of the repeater with a persecution complex, we really have something. For many months at Project Blue Book, we received frequent letters from an inmate of a mental institution, who exhorted us to do something about the UFOs that visited him regularly and interfered with his sexual functions.

The work of the credibility panel would really be much more difficult than that of the scientific panel. The latter has only to determine whether the contents of the report, as given, are easy or hard to explain in the context of present-day science. The credibility panel, however, has to decide not only whether the witnesses, taken together, are trustworthy, honorable and responsible people who can be believed in everyday matters, but

also whether they could have been capable of gross errors and misinterpretations in the particular instance of their UFO sighting. Is it possible, for instance, for several people in concert to see a bright star and have it trigger in the brain the impression that what was really seen was a moving spaceship with portholes?

The idea that reports made by policemen and Air Force pilots must be correct is entirely unjustified. A highly technical, trained observer skilled in one area of operation or observation does not necessarily transfer his critical skills to a situation in which he is observing something that is surprising to him. Pilots have been known to swerve their planes violently when they suddenly encounter a very bright meteor they think is on a collision course, but which later proves to have been 50 to 100 miles away. And policemen can grossly misinterpret something with which they have no familiarity. Still, on the average, if several pilots and/or policemen concur on the main points of the story, particularly if the du

"I see. Due to your corrupt mismanagement, the people of your country are starving and rebellious, and you urgently require American aid. Right. How many machine guns?" Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R0

ration of their experience was long enough (a matter of minutes rather than seconds) to have brought their judgment into play, it is difficult to brush aside their seemingly hardheaded testimony. And when one gets high $ \boldsymbol{\Sigma} $ reports from scientists, engineers and technicians whose credibility by all common standards is high and whose moral caliber seems to preclude a hoax, one can do no less than hear them out, in all seriousness.

Hoaxes are not as common as depicted in the newspapers. Pranks by college students and everyday practical jokers make good copy and are always good for a laugh, especially if the hoax has succeeded in at least temporarily fooling some respected citizenry. Hoaxes are frequently accompanied by photographs, on the mistaken idea that a photograph is worth ten thousand words. Actually, a photograph is worth nothing unless we know the full circumstances of how it was taken. I simply will not take a photograph seriously unless I can interrogate witnesses who saw the object in question being photographed and unless I can have access to the original negative and the technical data on the camera. So far, I have not been able myself to accept any photographs as representing incontrovertible scientific proof of the existence of truly strange objects.

Any sensible investigation of UFO reports will limit itself to reports that exhibit both a high $ \Sigma $ level and a high C level. It will ask whether there are any apparently meaningful patterns among such reports: patterns of kinematic behavior, of luminescence, of geometry, of geographical distribution or of seasonal distribution. With the aid of the electronic computer, cross-correlations will be sought between these and other factors.

It may come as a surprise that this sort of search for patterns has not been conducted by the Air Force all along. The closest the Government came to such an investigation was in 1953. A distinguished panel of scientists, under Caltech physicist Howard P. Robertson, was appointed to review the matter, but the panel was given only a limited number of cases to examine and was able to allot only four days to its study. Our Government's approach in all other instances has been to treat each reported sighting as though it were the only one in existence. The Air Force has tried to knock down each report as it showed its head, like a duck in a shooting gallery. This "divide and conquer" technique is powerless to detect significant patterns, the very mainstay of the scientific method.

The approach to the study of UFO reports proposed here is designed specifically to reveal patterns if they exist—to extract the scientific gold from the only ore we have (UFO reports), if such gold exists.