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![]() Michael Swords |
UFOs and Government: Special Report 14
We shall begin with a problem mentioned in the last
chapter (UFOs and Government) that was left on the Air
Force doorstep by Congressman John Moss, when he wrote
to Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles. Moss
asked why the ballyhooed Blue Book 14 report was so
hard to access. Was the Air Force, as some charged,
hiding something? This question put the Air Force in
an immediate bind from which it took more than a year
to extricate itself. The Air Force could not afford to
be accused of a cover-up (they knew that NICAP was
ready to leap at that), and they had no money to
publish a mass printing. The original report by
Battelle was about 300 pages. They distilled this to
less than 100 pages when they printed the formal
document in 1955. Conversation between ATIC and the
Pentagon concluded that there was no solution except
to fund a large reprinting of Blue Book 14, tell
Secretary Quarles about it, and draft a letter for him
to send to Congressman Moss. That was more expensive
than they liked, but at least it solved the immediate
problem. The longer range issue was: should the Blue
Book 14 report be reproduced as is, or should some
addendum be attached (with textual polishing) to make
the report as useful as possible? That addendum and
polishing took another year.
The available documents say many things of
interest, especially when read in the context in which
they were created. They present a Project Blue Book
entirely fixated on problems resident in the public
rather than those resident in the phenomenon. It was
as if, for Blue Book, the phenomenon had disappeared.
To accomplish the upgraded publication of Blue Book
14, a special coordination group was set up between
ATIC and the Pentagon. The main individual on the
Pentagon side was Major James F. Byrne, who would
serve as contact point for whatever the Pentagon
"Press Desk" released to the public and also provide a
link in the chain of information to specific
congressional offices. On ATIC's end, Captain George
Gregory, then-chief officer of Blue Book, would be a
focus-point, but as a scientific advisor, A. Francis
Arcier played a large role as well. As the months went
on, these three men plus two others, Colonel James
Boland and Major Lawrence Tacker, would crystallize
into a regularly meeting "fire suppressant"
anti-Keyhoe group. For the moment, however, Byrne,
Gregory, and Arcier were only worried about Blue Book
14's required publicly-accessible release. Initially,
Byrne and an associate, Mr. L. A. Sanderson, were
invited to ATIC so that, as Arcier said it, Captain
Gregory could "conduct this indoctrination."
Byrne seemed happy with the resultant plan. In May
1957 he wrote to Pentagon higher-ups that publication
of Blue Book 14 alongside an updated Air Force
Regulation 200-2 (reworded to eliminate language that
might provoke suspicion or misinterpretation by the
public), "should do much toward the relief of [Air
Force Intelligence] AFOIN in the UFO Program ... In
every instance where by inference the Air Force might
appear critical of, or attempt to deceive the public,
the text has been removed or altered."9 Byrne also
noted that "The subject of U.S. persons using the UFO
hysteria for personal gain has been informally brought
to the attention of the FBI. Documented cases where
illicit or deceptive devices or methods are used by
individuals to arouse public interest in UFOs should
be made available to the FBI."
By July, the polishing of the original Blue Book 14
and the writing of the new addendum were well along.
In the rewritten "Preface," Captain Gregory said that
its goals were to make the subject more
understandable, to inform the reader discreetly that
the Air Force is well aware that there have been
detractors of the Air Force and the Report, and to
"leave the impression of 'good faith' towards the
public."1 All of that can be viewed as completely
appropriate, but, given what we have seen of the
attitude of the times, there is a hint of
less-than-frank-openness in these words.
The wording of the draft document for the new preface shows very careful consideration. The specter of Keyhoe and the rest of the UFO community, ready to pounce at any hint of cover-up or information manipulation, haunts the language used. Gregory, in his margins, explains his strategies to head off these expected attacks and predicts UFO organization attacks if certain phrases are not included. At one point Gregory notes that the confession of an Air Force error (in the statistical use of the Chi Square method) will make them look good." The second, and longer, addition to the new Blue
Book 14 report consisted of material bringing the
subject up-to-date (from mid-1955 to 1957). The big
message was: reports are up but unknowns are down.
This was because of "improvement in reporting,
investigating, and analytical techniques." The
inaccuracy in this wording is striking. The rise in
reports was said to be due to publicity (particularly
certain books) and organizations, clubs, and
societies. That claim was a half-truth. Early on,
students of the field realized that publicity
(particularly of impressive cases) stimulated people
to report old sightings about which they had been
reluctant to speak. But publicity did not typically
produce new case claims. When people told others
(about having seen the phenomenon), it did have a
social component. Ed Ruppelt had noted this in 1952 as
we have seen. The Air Force of 1957, however, did not
see an advantage in mentioning this distinction.
Instead, Gregory and Arcier composed both a page of
writing and a highly debatable, if not meaningless,
chart of UFO reports (with about two dozen peaks and
dates of four magazine articles and two instances of
press publication) that attempted to correlate
publicity to sightings. The magazine articles, one
would assume, would have spawned bursts of UFO claims.
There is no graphical evidence that they did. The
press coverage, by definition, must come after the
sightings it is coveringa point seemingly opaque to
the ATIC people, who had a viewpoint to sell. This is
not to say that one could not make a study of
publicity (of the proper type, like Keyhoe or Ruppelt
books, or the movie UFO), then do the difficult job of
plotting post-publication (i.e. new) reports vs. a
background level (i.e. of ordinary publicity) of
reports, and then see if such a hypothesis were true,
but Gregory and Arcier did nothing of the sort. In an
otherwise good strategic effort, it was a surprisingly
sloppy blot on their work.
The argument that UFO publicity caused more UFO
sightings allowed Gregory and Arcier to complain about
the growth of the civilian organizations and their
newsletters. They also complained that civilian
organizations pulled in cases to themselves and away
from the Air Force, and, having described such cases
"with occasional lack of restraint," then the Air
Force was badgered by inquiries on these
too-old-to-investigate cases, and was unjustly
criticized for having no answers. Indeed, it is a sad
and unfair picture painted by Gregory. The Air Force
is doing the best it can but, due to the "personal
impressions and interpretations" inserted into reports
by the witnesses, the lack of controlled conditions,
and the consequent low quality of the reports, "it is
doubtful that the number of unknowns will ever be
reduced to zero."
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