The Condon Report

The study designed, its own memo hinted, to reach its conclusion first.

Picture a respected physicist, a man who worked on the Manhattan Project, being handed the most controversial science question in America. The Air Force wants an independent answer on UFOs, once and for all. And they've chosen you, Dr. Edward Condon of the University of Colorado, to deliver it. The public is told this will be objective. Impartial. The final word. Here's what's documented. From 1966 to 1968, the University of Colorado ran a federally funded study, the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, under Condon's direction. In 1968 it published its findings, a dense volume of case investigations and analysis. Its bottom line was blunt: nothing had come from studying UFOs in the past twenty-one years that had added to scientific knowledge, and further extensive study probably couldn't be justified. On the strength of that conclusion, the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book the following year. So here's where it gets strange. Before the study had really gotten going, a memo was written inside the project by an administrator named Robert Low. And that memo, later leaked, contained a line that would haunt the whole enterprise. Low suggested the study could be done so that, to the public, it would appear totally objective, while to the scientific community it would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but almost certainly finding no proof. The trick, he wrote, would be to describe the project so that it stayed away from the question of the reality of the phenomenon. Read that again. The concern raised by critics was that the conclusion may have been decided before the investigation began. Now, let's be fair to the record, because this is where you have to separate documented fact from interpretation. The Low memo is real; it exists and it says what it says. That's documented. But whether it proves the study was rigged, or was just one administrator musing about how to fund a politically radioactive project, is a matter of interpretation. Two members of Condon's own team were fired amid the controversy. Critics, including the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, argued the report's own case files were more intriguing than its dismissive summary admitted, that roughly a third of the cases studied remained unexplained even as the conclusion waved the subject away. So you're left with a genuine puzzle. A prestigious study said stop looking. And a leaked memo suggested that stopping was, at least to one person, the plan all along. That doesn't prove a cover-up. But it's exactly the kind of gap that speculation loves to fill, and you should sit in that discomfort rather than resolve it too fast. The Condon Report is the hinge of this whole story. It's the document that gave the government permission to close the file. When Blue Book ended in 1969, this report was the reason. On our map, the Condon Report sits downstream, the conclusion that shut the era down. Follow the thread back and you land on the program it terminated, Project Blue Book.