BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
The Condon Report
There are, in a certain sense, at least two “Condon Reports”. First is the one that was actually printed, to which we mainly address ourselves here. The second is a kind of spook, shadow version, which exists in a certain branch of ufological mythology as a fraud upon the public. Reading the actual report tends to dissolve this perception, which was propagated, with unnerving success, by a handful of obsessively energetic believers in the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). We deal with them as best we can, without writing a history book – fascinating as that would be. The report also had a history, involving the US Air Force’s discomfort at being the official, and much-abused, face of flying saucers, a secret committee or two, and fearsome lobbying for Congressional hearings. All this too we have to pass over. But from the mid-1960s, there was much discussion in official circles of how an independent university-based study might put the subject to bed, and so let the Air Force off its hook. The upshot was the Condon Committee, and the Condon Report, whose 50th birthday occurs later this year.
The US Air Force did not find it easy to persuade an academic institution to take on its proposed study. Eventually, the University of Colorado at Boulder agreed to accept the work. The contract both protected and demanded the university’s scientific integrity: “The work will be conducted under conditions of strictest objectivity by investigators who, as carefully as can be determined, have no predilections or preconceived positions on the UFO question. This is essential if the public, the Congress, the Executive and the scientific community are to have confidence in the study.” The Air Force announced the agreement on 7 October 1966. The project director – whose reluctance too had to be overcome – was to be Dr Edward Uhler Condon. The project would be co-ordinated by Assistant Dean Robert Low.
In many ways, Professor Condon was an ideal choice. His scientific credentials were beyond reproach: he had contributed to the development of radar and the atomic bomb and had written the standard textbook on atomic spectra. In the early 1950s his recommendation that the Atomic Energy Commission be put under civilian control was accepted. For this, he apparently inspired the enmity of Richard Nixon, and was attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a follower of “a new revolutionary movement” – by which it seems they meant the sedition represented by quantum mechanics – and had his security clearances revoked. Surviving this onslaught, in 1958 he accused the US Government of misrepresenting the effects of nuclear fallout. Condon was no yes-man, and had no need to prove his integrity.
He also had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Among believers, Condon’s reputation for objectivity evaporated as word spread of his irreverence – which extended to practical jokes. One prank led to a reception committee representing the governor of Utah, complete with brass band, waiting several hours at the Bonneville Salt Flats racetrack for a telepathically predicted UFO landing.
Contrary to the agreement with the Air Force, several members of Condon’s team were already predisposed to accept the ETH. Chief among them were psychologist Dr David Saunders, electrical engineer Dr Norman E Levine, and Mary Lou Armstrong, the project’s administrative secretary. They were also close to Donald Keyhoe, who broadly supported the study and provided it with case material from NICAP regional investigators. When on 27 September 1967 the Rocky Mountain News reported that Condon was “disenchanted” with UFOs and was unimpressed by NICAP’s contributions to the study, Keyhoe withdrew NICAP’s support.
At this point, atmospheric physicist Dr James McDonald, another disciple of Keyhoe, became central to the way the Condon investigation would be perceived in the future. McDonald had hoped to join the project but was not invited to do so. To compensate, and some would say to meddle, he had maintained excellent contacts with the ETHers on its staff. As a result, he had been made privy to an internal memo, written in August 1966 by Robert Low. In McDonald’s and Saunders’s eyes, it appeared to compromise the integrity of the whole enterprise. McDonald was characterised by Watch the Skies! author Curtis Peebles as “an angry, aggressive, driven, manipulative and ambitious individual”. One can see how such a picture could be drawn from his subsequent behaviour toward Condon, imperfect as he too may have been. McDonald learned of the crisis between Condon and his staff from Saunders, and in January 1968 wrote to Low, complaining about all aspects of the project. In the course of his harangue, he quoted Low’s memo back at him.
Musing on whether the University of Colorado would be well-advised to take on the UFO study, Low had presented the opinions of colleagues who were for and against taking it on, and finally gave his own view: “Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by nonbelievers who, although they couldn’t possibly prove a
negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.”
Low suggested the study should emphasise psychological aspects of UFO reports, not “the old question of the physical reality of the saucers”; that approach might at least produce some worthwhile scholarly papers and successfully project “the image we want to present to the scientific community”.
However, Low’s memo was concerned solely with the light in which scientists and academics would view the university if it accepted the Air Force contract. Over and over he uses terms like “image” and “present”. It was not about the way the project would actually be run. The word “trick”, in this context, is clearly used in the sense of technique, manner or mode (of presentation) – in other words, “the way round the ‘image’ problem”. It was not used to imply deception, sham, deceit, shenanigans or fraud. But that’s the misleading sense that generations of wiseacre ufologists have promulgated ever since.
The memo was never more than a rumination on the University of Colorado and its standing in scientific circles. Condon himself had never heard of it until McDonald quoted it to Low. But its assessment, and the factionalism that divided Condon’s staff, make clear that the USAF’s demand for the “strictest objectivity by investigators who... have no predilections or preconceived positions on the UFO question” was, in reality, impossible to fulfil. Some kind of tension was bound to plague such a project, because there could hardly have existed a soul in the land who did not have an opinion of some kind about flying saucers. Condon certainly could have deployed both his sense of humour and his scientific gifts more diplomatically and more constructively, to persuade rather than to confront or mock (or more often, simply ignore) the beliefs abroad among his team.
The Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Objects as presented to the USAF occupied three bound volumes and 1,465 pages. Two paperback editions were published, both stretching to nearly 1,000 pages.
One of the ritual lamentations of ufologists down the ages has been that Condon’s assessment of the UFO phenomenon, which led the report off under the title “Conclusions and Recommendations”, bore little or no relation to the overwhelming evidence of a real mystery that appeared in the following pages. Condon wrote: “The emphasis of this study has been on attempting to learn from UFO reports anything that could be considered as adding to scientific knowledge. Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
The key words here are “science” and “scientific”. Condon proceeded to write, in characteristically urbane and articulate style, an essay on the workings of what philosopher Michael Polanyi was to call “the republic of science” – the regulation of scientific discovery by scientists. He drew the logical, and liberal, conclusion: that if scientists thought the report’s findings were wrong, and had ideas for more accurate studies, “such ideas should be supported.... each individual case ought to be carefully considered on its own merits.”
Condon said that it was his team’s task to investigate “curious entities distinguished by lack of knowledge of what they are, rather than in terms of what they are known to be.” This was a reversal, in principle, of the starting point accepted by almost every endeavour to increase scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, the quality, depth and integrity of the analyses conducted, from modern UFO experiences and UFOs in history, through plasma physics and the “natural philosophy” of flying saucers, surpasses anything that the ufological community had produced at that time, and most of what it has had to offer since. But that was all too subtle for the ufologists. Their objection to Condon’s conclusion was based on the sighting reports – or rather, on the final assessments of the reports. More than half the cases the Condon study considered, in detail or in passing, could be called “unexplained”. A more conservative estimate would put the “unknowns” in the Condon Report at about one in three cases. This was far higher than the Blue Book rate (which between 1947 and 1969 averaged 5.5 per cent and, if one removed the anomalous figures for 1952, sank to 3.58 per cent), and far higher too than the civilian investigators’ groups regularly achieved. The ufological outrage at Condon is usually – not always – inspired by the flawed supposition that what is not explicable in the reports is extraterrestrial. But this does not follow. Even so, it was at least a tactical error by Condon not to anticipate the believers’ reaction. His report would have been stronger if (as one committee had suggested) his team had examined 100 well-documented cases. If these had been “best cases” as advised by NICAP, APRO and Blue Book, he would have deflected yet more criticism. Donald Menzel and Ernest Taves (in
The UFO Enigma, 1977) had a sharper objection to the proportion of unknowns. All of them, they thought, were explicable, although “some are indeed so trivial as to scarcely warrant the attempt”. And in 28 crisply argued pages they demolished the 23 reports listed overtly as unexplained in the study. Not all are as finally dismissable as these arch-sceptics would have us believe. But it is worth mentioning that their solution to one “classic” (still being recycled in the UFO literature), the radar/visual reported from an RB47 reconnaissance aircraft near Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1957, was accepted by the crew of the plane as correct. They note that Nick Mariana, photographer of the celebrated Great Falls, Montana, UFOs (see Case #10) was a journalism graduate and “publicity-minded”, and find it remarkable that the two USAF jets in the air at the time of the sighting detected no UFOs. They disposed effectively too of several claimed sightings by astronauts that Condon’s team had failed to explain.
The Condon report was a landmark in ufology. Its most careful arguments were, sadly, ignored for the most part for the sake of some ill-founded gibing and scoffing, but it ended the USAF’s official, overt interest in flying saucers. On 17 December 1969, Secretary of the Air Force Robert C Seamans Jr announced the closure of Blue Book.
The reaction of ufologists was almost one of relief. NICAP said, as if Condon had never issued his report: “UFOs can now be given the serious scientific attention they require, free from military considerations.” The organisation also thought that the Air Force decision opened the way for “a fresh look at the UFO problem”. Indeed, it did. The 1970s would see a free-for-all among ufologists vying for the most intriguing way to account for the phenomenon.
“BOOKS ARE LIKE MIRRORS: IF A FOOL LOOKS IN, YOU CANNOT EXPECT A GENIUS TO LOOK OUT.” J.K. Rowling