Project Blue Book

12,618 sightings; 701 never explained. The Air Force closed the ledger anyway.

Ruppelt, its first chief, coined 'UFO,' demanded serious methodology, and wrote later that the 1948 Estimate of the Situation — concluding interplanetary — was burned on a general's order. By the end, per its own staff, the project was a public-relations valve: explain, dismiss, reassure. The 701 unexplained cases were the residue that wouldn't dissolve. Hynek, the astronomer hired to debunk, left a believer and founded the field's only respectable archive.