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This FBI file section, serial 448 onward of 62-HQ-83894, gathers UFO correspondence from 1966 to 1977. It includes J. Edgar Hoover's reply to Florence C. Dow of Goffstown, New Hampshire, who had asked whether the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America was backed by communists. Her enclosed July 1966 issue of the AFSCA journal is also in the file. Later items are a 1977 Air Force UFO fact sheet on the end of Project Blue Book and a White House inquiry, to which the FBI replied that it has no jurisdiction over UFO sightings.
' - f -'r . ........ of the 11,000 sightings · since 1947, did have some ex planations. ·Th e mystedous f 1am in g object in the East was "probably a meteor." As for :Michigan's much • you details," he complained.'No Threat' "If they did, many of their The main conclusions explanations would fall flat." r e a ch e d by the Air Force And K e y h o e could alsowere: claim a powerful ally in ~ "No unidentified fiying public i z e d and plentiful unidentified f 1 y i n g objects, they turned out to be monkeyshines i n s t e a d of moonships : ..C'nidentified c~llege boys" playing pranks with flares to frighten the g i r 1 s in the dormitories, came the aug4st report from a distinguished astronomer called in by the Air Force to investigate the HiUsdale af fair. E very r.eport of a "flyina saucer " had ostensibly beenb ch e ck e d out by the Air F orce's special squad known as ''Project Blue Book," al though the staff was woefully small. Of the 10,147 sightings s 1 n c e 1947, the Air Force insisted that only 646 remain unexplained - and most of these because of insufficient information. The others have been attributed to . planes, b a 11 o o n s, astronomical causes, missiles, swamp gas, meteo r s, fireworks and, in some cases, to hallucinations ru1d psychological reasons. Ball Ligbining? Philip Klass, avionics edi tor of Aviation Week & Space Technolo g y magazine, recently proposed soine other exp I an at ions. Klass, an electronics engineer, said a form of "ball lightning," gen er ated by high tension power lines, could explain the phe nomena. Many of the sightings, said -mass, occw·red along or very near high-tension lines where luminous balls of ionized air could be g e n e r a t e d under certain conditions. obJects reported, investigat ed and evaluated by the Air · Force haYe ever given any in dication of a threat to our national security." o "There has been no ev- Tclence submitted to or discov ered by the Air Force that sightings r epresent t e c h n o- •1ogical developments or prin ciple s beyond the range of present day scientific knowl edge." c " There has been no evi dence th2t sightings catego rized as unidentified are ex traterrestrial vehicles." Major D on al d Keyhoe, however, w as unconvinced. Major Key h oe, USMC (re tired), dir ector of the Nation al Investigations Committee on A er i a I P henomena (NI• CAP ), a private space watch ing organization, accused the Air F o·r c e of conducting a long-term whitewash on the UFO question. It wa_s Keyhoe's theory that the Air Force was with holding information for fea~ of c a u s in g public panic. UFOs, insisted the Major, who had never seen one. were of exb-aterrestrial origin an.: the Air Force feared that the public could not accept this knowledge. " They won't give Michigan's Ger ald Ford, the· Hou se Republican leader, who suggcs:ed it would be " a very wholesome thin g" for Congress to look into uniden tified flying objects. Such an investigation. Ford suggest ed. would make the Ameri can people '·feel better." - Study in Depth Whether or not that was· so, the Air Force last week took definite steps to make itself feel better. Fed up with in yestigating r eports of glow ing, f l y i n g. zooming, wink ing, awe s ome, blinking, streaking, hoveling things, the Air Force last week de cided to bail itself out of all responsibility for future con clusions concerning UFOs. The Air Force announced that it had commissioned the University of c o 1 0 r a d O to conduct an "in-depth" study of flying saucers for the next 18 m O n th s. The director of the study (expected to cost $300,000) would be Dr. Ed ward U. Condon, former di rector of the National Bureau of St an d a r d s, and now a physics professor at Colora do. . To satisfy the skeptics, and rnsm·e the study's objectivi ty' C o 1 o r a d o would select several other universities to ~ake ~art. in the independent m~est~gation, with about 100 scientists participating. And in c.a s e that wasn't enough, the National Acade my of Sciences also agreed to appoint a panel to review the Colorado report.
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