Public pressure in the late 1950s forced the CIA to consider declassifying UFO reports, but it was in no hurry to do so. Its first director, Vice Admiral Rosco Hillenketter, wanted public disclosure, but this desire was not universal within the CIA. Donald E. Keyhoe, then a member of the National Committee for the Investigation of Aerial Phenomena (the English acronym for NICAP), knew of the CIA director's desire and wrote about it in his books, but for more than a decade those reports remained secret.
NICAP
The UFO research group NICAP remained the most active UFO research group in the United States from the 1950s through the 1980s, primarily as a huge repository of information about the UFO phenomenon. NICAP advocated scientific investigation of UFOs, but was skeptical of "contactee" accounts of encounters with space aliens and alien abductions. Several prominent military officials were members of the organization, giving it added respectability. Throughout its existence, NICAP has stood by the government's organized cover-up of UFO evidence.
NICAP was founded by inventor Thomas Townsend Brown on October 24, 1956. The board of governors included several prominent individuals, including former Navy guided missile program manager Delmer S. Farney and U.S. Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe, both retired. Brown soon resigned as director and was succeeded by Farney. On January 16, 1957, he called a press conference and announced that UFOs were neither Soviet nor American in origin, but were under reasonable control.
In April 1957, Keyhoe became director of NICAP by inducting his Naval Academy classmate, Roscoe H. Hillenketter, the first head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The organization also included several prominent physicians, scientists, military personnel, and journalists. By 1958, it had more than 5,000 members.
The main purpose of NICAP was to thoroughly investigate UFO reports, although financially the organization was barely making ends meet throughout its existence.
Kehoe often paid most of the operating expenses himself. The group's financial situation was somewhat improved by a large influx of members in the early 1960s, when NICAP membership reached 14,000. In 1964, the organization published a book, UFO Evidence, edited by Richard H. Hall, which outlined hundreds of unexplained reports and UFO sightings by pilots, military personnel, aviation experts engineers, and scientists.
One chapter of the book provided evidence for intelligent control of flying saucers, and the other gave physical interactions such as electromagnetic and sound effects, flight and maneuvering characteristics, UFO color and shape, photographs, radar tracking, and so on.
In the field of unidentified object research, this book is considered an invaluable reference source to this day. In December 1969, Colonel Joseph Bryan III took over the NICAP board, and Keyhoe focused on the CIA's cover-up of UFO facts. In 1980, the organization was dissolved and the archive of their files was purchased by the Center for UFO Research.
Condon Committee
Even before NICAP was disbanded, there was a noticeable waning of U.S. Air Force interest in UFO reports. This happened in 1969, following a study conducted by the University of Colorado, headed by Edward W. Condon. Their report revealed that "nothing has occurred in recent years that would add UFO information to scientific knowledge." Condon's committee concluded that further research "cannot be justified."
Condon's group was funded at the University of Colorado from 1966 to 1968 by the U.S. Air Force, which offered the university $313,000 for the study. The scientists reviewed hundreds of files from Blue Book, civic groups, the NICAP National Committee, and other organizations.
Condon's group included astronomer William C. Hartmann, physicist Frederick Ayer, chemist Roy Craig, electrical engineer Norman Levine, psychologists Michael Wertheimer and Dan Culbertson, and several other experts working as consultants on a temporary basis. Their conclusion was that the study of UFOs was unlikely to lead to major scientific discoveries.
In November 1966, NICAP decided to share its findings with Condon's group, and Keyhoe addressed the Committee at a briefing. Condon's staff lacked knowledge and experience in UFO research and coordination in working with each other.
Regarding the extraterrestrial hypothesis, members of the Committee took very different approaches to the subject. In late January 1967, in one of his lectures, Condon stated that the government should not study UFOs because the subject was, in his opinion, "nonsense." In protest, NICAP members left Condon's committee in extreme concern to preserve the valuable source of material they had collected and to prevent its destruction.
The Condon Committee report, published in January 1969, was an entire hardcover book of 1,485 pages that included old UFO reports, new cases, photographs, radar evidence, and strange objects seen by astronauts. It was the conclusions of Condon's report that there was "no high priority" in the study of UFOs that caused Project Blue Book to be shut down on December 17, 1969, before the report was even published.
While the media reacted favorably to the Condor team's findings, many scientists were outraged by the conclusions reached. They sought support from the government but did not receive it.
Even among the Committee's temporary consultants was one Gerald Rothberg, who wrote in the December issue of Physics Today that a few cases out of the hundreds he had carefully investigated left him puzzled. Critics argued that the UFO sightings described by Condon's group were misleading, "burying" among the many insignificant reports the most mysterious of them.
Astrophysicist
Peter A. Starrock cited the case of a
UFO traveling at supersonic speeds without making any noise. He wrote, "
It should not be thought that a more advanced civilization could not have found a way to travel at supersonic speed without producing a sonic boom."