Behavior Whatever Happened to UFO's?

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

E. U. CONDON

# UFOs I Have Loved and Lost

Professor Condon conducted a study of Unidentified Flying Objects, from late 1966 to the summer of 1968, at the request of the U.S. Air Force. The full report has been published under the title, "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects," in paperback by Bantam Books, and in hardback by E. P. Dutton and Co. This article is based on a talk presented before the American Philosophical Society last April. The author is professor of physics at the University of Colorado.

Throughout human history men have been seeing strange and terrifying apparitions in the sky. The literature dealing with such experiences is enormous. The word "spectre" is used generically to describe phenomena of this type. This word's earliest use, cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is in the title of a book by Z. Jones published in 1605, "A Treatise of Specters or straunge Sights, Visions and Apparitions appearing sensibly unto men." The word "spectrum" is cited first in 1611 in a passage which said, "Walsingham hath written of a fatal Spectrum or Apparition . . . where sundry monsters of diuers colours . . . were seen." Sixty years later, Isaac Newton used the word to describe his decomposition of sunlight with a glass prism in these words, "The Sunbeams . . . passing through a glass prism to the opposite Wall, exhibited there a Spectrum of divers colours."

From these two uses of the word "spectrum" comes naturally the two meanings which the OED gives for the word "spectrology": (1) The science or study of spectres, and (2) The scientific study of spectra. The OED cites as an example of the first meaning an 1820 quote from Washington Irving's "Sketchbook": "The gloom of religious abstraction, and the wildness of their situation . . . had filled their imaginations with the frightful chimeras of witchcraft and spectrology." And of the second, an 1862 quote from the "American Journal of Science": "The attention of the French scientific world is wholly fixed on spectrology, for thus do they designate the experiment with the spectroscope of Bunsen and Kirchhoff."

I am the second man in human history to have written a book on spectrology in both of these two distinct meanings. Donald Menzel was the first.

## FLYING SAUCERS

Modern interest in UFOs stems mainly from the observations of Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman on June 24, 1947. While flying near Mt. Rainier in Washington he reported seeing some objects skimming along which he described in a manner that led newspapermen to call them "flying saucers." Although not all objects later reported are saucer-shaped, this term is often used generically, but the term UFO is preferable. The Air Force studies anything seen flying in the sky which might present a defense hazard, and thus has been concerned with the thousands of reports of sightings of UFOs that have come to them in the nearly 22 years since this first modern report.

From such study they concluded long ago that no defense problem was involved in these reports from the public. The amount of attention which the Air Force gave to the problem after the first four or five years has been minimal.

In the early '50s the story of UFOs began to appear in sensational pseudoscience magazine articles and paperback books. These have had a large sale. The book by Frank Edwards, "Flying Saucers—Serious Business," probably holds the record with more than 1,300,000 copies sold. Several other titles have sold more than 200,000 copies. The so-called Condon report was given an initial printing of 200,000 copies. In the last three years 40,000 school children have written the Air Force asking for UFO data.

The principal source of the widespread interest is the contention of some writers that at least some of the

things seen may represent flying craft from other civilizations, either elsewhere in the solar system, or even from a planetary system associated with some other star.

We must be extremely careful about our language. Some UFOs may be such visitors, it may be postulated, and some writers go so far as to say that they actually are. To discover clear, unambiguous evidence on this point would be a scientific discovery of the first magnitude, one which I would be quite happy to make. We found no such evidence, and so state in our report. But it is not true to say that we "proved that flying saucers do not come from outer space." All that can be said is that, of the cases we looked into carefully, we found no evidence in support of the hypothesis of their extra-terrestrial origin.

## STUDY ADVISABLE

We concluded that it is not worthwhile to carry on a continuing study of UFOs in the manner which has been done thus far: that of going out into the field to interview persons who say they have seen something peculiar. The difficulty about using objective means of study lies in the rarity of the apparitions, their short duration, and the tendency of observers not to report their experience until long after it has ended. When a known object is the source of many reports, as in the case of the Zond IV re-entry of March 3, 1968, there is extraordinary disagreement among the descriptions of what was seen by different observers of the same event. This result shows that no great certainty attaches to the specific details of any of the reports.

These difficulties led us to conclude that it is quite unproductive of results of scientific value to study UFOs in the traditional manner. But, contrary to popular belief, we do not rule out all future study. We say: "Although we conclude after nearly two years of intensive study, that we do not see any fruitful lines of advance from the study of UFO reports, we believe that any scientist with adequate training and