![]() Their conclusions were that (1) 90 percent of the sightings could be easily attributed to astronomical and meteorologic phenomena (e.g., bright planets and stars, meteors, auroras, ion clouds) or to such earthly objects as aircraft, balloons, birds, and searchlights, (2) there was no obvious security threat, and (3) there was no evidence to support the ETH. They also reviewed films and photographs of UFOs. The Robertson Panel met for three days in 1953 and interviewed military officers and the head of Project Blue Book. Robertson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and included other physicists, an astronomer, and a rocket engineer. government to establish an expert panel of scientists to investigate the phenomena. This led the Central Intelligence Agency to prompt the U.S. Meanwhile, the number of UFO reports had climbed to a record high. ![]() Although these events were attributed to temperature inversions in the air over the city, not everyone was convinced by this explanation. In the hot summer of 1952 a provocative series of radar and visual sightings occurred near National Airport in Washington, D.C. The Robertson Panel and the Condon ReportĪn American obsession with the UFO phenomenon was under way. From 1952 to 1969 Project Blue Book compiled reports of more than 12,000 sightings or events, each of which was ultimately classified as (1) “identified” with a known astronomical, atmospheric, or artificial (human-caused) phenomenon or (2) “unidentified.” The latter category, approximately 6 percent of the total, included cases for which there was insufficient information to make an identification with a known phenomenon. Within a year, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge, which in 1952 was itself replaced by the longest-lived of the official inquiries into UFOs, Project Blue Book, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The initial opinion of those involved with the project was that the UFOs were most likely sophisticated Soviet aircraft, although some researchers suggested that they might be spacecraft from other worlds, the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Air Force began an investigation of these reports called Project Sign. Sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena increased, and in 1948 the U.S. Arnold estimated the speed of the crescent-shaped objects as several thousand miles per hour and said they moved “like saucers skipping on water.” In the newspaper report that followed, it was mistakenly stated that the objects were saucer-shaped, hence the term flying saucer. The first well-known UFO sighting occurred in 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold claimed to see a group of nine high-speed objects near Mount Rainier in Washington while flying his small plane.
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