Ep. 9: Blue Book: The Trick | The trick was the word. The leak. The letter. The missing pages.

On August 9, 1966, three months before the Condon Committee began its formal work, the committee's own coordinator sat down at a typewriter and produced a one-page memorandum. He addressed it to two senior administrators of the University of Colorado. He called it "Some Thoughts on the UFO Project." He surveyed the internal politics. He laid out the case for the school accepting the Air Force contract. He used the word "trick" to describe the structure he was proposing. The trick, he wrote, would be to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study, while the scientific community would see a group of nonbelievers with almost zero expectation of finding a saucer. The next sentence was the operating instruction: stress investigation, not of the physical phenomena, but rather of the people who do the observing. Three months before the work began, in writing, the coordinator of the United States Air Force's independent scientific review of unidentified flying objects had laid out how the verdict would be reached.This is the third and final episode of the Project Blue Book triptych. It picks up where Episode 8 ended, in April 1966, with Gerald Ford's hearings ordered and an independent civilian review on its way to the University of Colorado. It runs through the Portage County chase of April 17, 1966, where four Ohio and Pennsylvania officers chased an unidentified object 85 miles across two states and were told by Project Blue Book they had chased the planet Venus. Six months later, in a Cleveland Plain Dealer interview carried on the Associated Press wire, Officer Dale Spaur told the country what the Venus explanation had cost him. The Air Force itself, on its own letterhead, in a May 17, 1966 letter from one of its information officers, conceded that one of the four officers had been driven off his police force by the consequences of the explanation.Then the Condon Committee. The Low memo, read in full. James E. McDonald walking into a House Committee on Science and Astronautics hearing on July 29, 1968, alone, the only senior atmospheric physicist of his rank in the country saying on the record that Project Blue Book was scientifically incompetent. The leak of the Low memo to Look magazine in May 1968. Mary Louise Armstrong's resignation. Saunders and Levine fired. J. Allen Hynek's October 7, 1968 letter to Colonel Raymond Sleeper, eight numbered observations, twenty years of complicity finally written down. The Condon Report. The National Academy of Sciences endorsement. The 1997 CIA admission, by Gerald Haines, that high-altitude reconnaissance flights accounted for over half of the late 1950s and 1960s UFO reports. The December 17, 1969 termination announcement, dated to avoid extending the project into a fourth decade.And the Bolender Memo. October 20, 1969. The single sentence on Air Force letterhead that establishes that UFO reports of national security interest were not, and as of that date had not been, processed through Project Blue Book. They went through JANAP 146 and Air Force Manual 55-11, the operational reporting channels. Project Blue Book was not the destination of the reports the Air Force itself considered nationally significant. Sixteen pages of attachments referenced in the memorandum are missing from the Air Force's files. They have never surfaced.Every claim is sourced to an original document. Full bibliography at unresolvedsignals.com.Sponsored by What's Near Me Now (https://nearmenow.us).