corroboration, as in the case of a sighting by one person in New York. Others in this category would include a failure to provide details of size, location or time.

Hynek, who worked as a scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, later complained of a reluctance to engage in a full investigation of UFO reports. He spoke of a ‘can’t be, therefore it isn’t’ attitude which permeated official thinking in both Project Grudge and Project Blue Book which meant that they had broken the cardinal rule of scientific procedure – investigate the facts before attempting to theorize. Hynek reported on the reluctance of the USAAF to investigate UFO reports after they were satisfied that there was no military threat involved. Scientists involved with the project, however, displayed an ambivalent attitude which Hynek (1977: 24) described as the ‘committee complex’ whereby ‘a scientist will confess in private to an interest in a subject which is controversial or not scientifically acceptable but generally will not stand up and be counted when in “committee” ’.

Other reports

Although the bulk of UFO investigation was conducted by the USAAF, official reports were conducted in other countries. In Canada a report was conducted by the Department of National Defence, and was known as Project Second Storey. This was conducted between 1952 and 1953. A low key operation was conducted by the RAF in England, who assigned one man to work with the Ministry of Defence where all sighting reports were sent. Sweden and Denmark also conducted low key inquiries.

The Colorado Project: the Condon Report

In 1966 the University of Colorado undertook a study of UFOs and Dr Edward Condon, Professor of Physics and Fellow of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, was the scientific director. The inquiry lasted for eighteen months and was published in 1968. Since then it has been known as the Condon Report. Although heavily criticized by Ufologists, the Condon Report was emphatic in its rejection of claims that extraterrestrial spacecraft were visiting the Earth. Dr Edward Condon, author of the report, was dismissive in his summary:

Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past twenty-one years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the re-cord as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.

(Condon, 1968: 1)

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Condon also reflected the opinions of many practical no-nonsense scientists when he outlined criteria for the acceptance of hypotheses concerning extraterrestrial craft. According to Condon:

The question of ETA (Extra Terrestrial Activity) would be settled in a few minutes if a flying saucer were to land on the lawn of a hotel where a convention of the American Physical Society was in progress, and its occupants were to emerge and present a paper to assembled physicists, revealing where they came from, and the technology of how their craft operates. Searching questions from the audience would follow.

(ibid.: 26)

One might even doubt whether this evidence would satisfy sceptics, as there is no mention of the requirement for the aliens to submit their report to a refereed and reputable scientific journal. Not to mention the fact that the extraterrestrials had not been funded by a reputable research contracting agency. But what would be the outcome if such a craft landed on the lawn of a hotel that was hosting an annual Ufology convention?

The Condon Report is a massive document covering over 900 pages of inquiry. Many reported sightings are either rubbished or explained in terms of conventional phenomena, such as aircraft, weather balloons, and so on. One typical example is an event in January 1968, near Castle Rock, Colorado, when thirty people reported UFOs, including a spacecraft with flashing lights. Observers even claimed to have seen the occupants who were presumed to have come from outer space. Two days later it was reported that two schoolboys had launched a polythene hot-air balloon in the vicinity of the sighting. But that was not the end of the matter. Reports taken from the original newspaper account of alien visitors were circulated to UFO journals, some of whom published them without reference to the explanation which followed. When criticism was made, one reply was that no one could be sure that all of the sightings were of the balloon and that there might well have been a genuine UFO as well as the balloon. This kind of argument, which clearly misplaces the burden of proof, has discredited Ufology as a serious branch of scientific research.

Critics of the Condon Report insist that too much emphasis was based upon the obviously dubious claims, leaving many anomalous observations under-examined. Hynek (1977: 286) and other investigators, have drawn attention to the summary of the Condon Report, which was dismissive of UFO observations and saw no need for further investigation, and the report itself which ‘could not identify about one-third of the cases it studied’. Condon’s definition of a UFO has also been criticized as it did not include the possibility of a distinction  between observations which were unidentified by experts and those which were unidentified by the lay public, thus opening the floodgates to dozens of spurious reports which a scientific committee should not waste its time on. Condon (1968) defined an unidentified object as ‘the stimulus for a report made by one or more

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