Conducted by the University of Colorado Under Research Contract Number 44620-67-C-0035 With the United States Air Force Dr. Edward U. Condon, Scientific Director __________________________________________ [1968] __________________________________________ Original Internet Edition Prepared by National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) With the Permission of The Regents of the University of Colorado SHG Edition Reproduced With Permission - August 2002 Copyright © 1968 by The Regents of The University of Colorado Electronic edition © 1999 by National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) ____________________________________________________________________________________________ FINAL REPORT Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects Conducted by the University of Colorado Under contract to the United States Air Force Dr. Edward U. Condon, Scientific Director Daniel S. Gillmor, Editor Copyright © 1968 by The Regents of The University of Colorado Electronic edition © 1999 by National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) The Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects was originally copyrighted in 1968 by the Regents of the University of Colorado, a body corporate. It was subsequently published in reports of the United States Air Force and other governmental agencies and was published commercially by Bantam Books (currently out of print). Permission is granted for non-commercial use of this electronic document, to link to it, mirror it on an Internet site, or reproduce it electronically in whole or in part without modification, provided that this notice is included. Any other use requires advance written permission from The Regents of the University of Colorado. The Condon Report: Introduction The "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" (Condon & Gillmor 1969; often referred to as the "Condon Report") presents the findings of the Colorado Project regarding a scientific study of unidentified flying objects. It remains the most influential public document concerning the current scientific status of the UFO issue. Following is a short chronology of events that led to the Air Force contract with the University of Colorado to initiate the study. This extract is from: An Analysis of the Condon Report on the Colorado UFO Project, by P.A. Sturrock, Center for Space Science and Astrophysics, Stanford University. Dr. Sturrock's analysis is highly recommended as a comprehensive introduction to the text. Additionally, we have included many relevant links that offer further context for the reader. [Editors note: Minor corrections and amendments have been made to Dr. Sturrock's original text.] The history of the UFO phenomenon in the United States is long and complex. Historian David M. Jacobs has provided a comprehensive account of this history in his book The UFO Controversy in America, (1975). The book presents a detailed account of the origin of the Colorado UFO Project, of which the following is a brief encapsulation. The United States Air Force carried out three consecutive studies of the UFO phenomenon over a 22-year period: Project Sign (1948), Project Grudge (1948 to 1952) and Project Blue Book (1952 to 1970). Although these studies and subsequent reports were initially classified, it appears that all reports (except Blue Book Special Report No. 13, if it ever existed) have now been declassified and are publicly available. [An exception is the "Estimate of the Situation" drafted by Project Sign and referred to by Ruppelt (1956) and Hynek (1972). Blue Book Special Report No. 13 may have been an initial draft of the Battelle study]. Two additional scientific studies that occurred within this timeframe deserve mention. For a period of four days in 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency convened a panel of scientific consultants to consider whether UFOs constitute a threat to national defense. This panel included H. P. Robertson (chairman), Luis Alvarez, Lloyd Berkner, Samuel A. Goudsmit and Thornton Page; with Frederick C. Durant and J. Allen Hynek serving as associate members. The panel concluded that there was "no evidence that the phenomena indicate a need for the revision of current scientific concepts," and that "the evidence . shows no indication that these phenomena constitute a direct physical threat to national security" (Jacobs, 1975). The Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Air Force from 1951 to 1954, conducted the second study. It was primarily a statistical analysis of the conditions and characteristics of UFO reports, though it also provided scientific services and included transcripts of several notable sightings. The subsequent report was initially classified, though later released as "Blue Book Special Report No. 14" in 1955. It contains a wealth of information and arrives at the notable conclusion that the more complete the data and the better the report; the more likely it was that the report would remain unidentified (Jacobs, 1975). On February 3, 1966, the Air Force convened an "Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book." Its members included Brian O'Brien (chairman), Launor Carter, Jesse Orlansky, Richard Porter, Carl Sagan, and Willis A. Ware. The committee recommended that the Air Force negotiate contracts "with a few selected universities to provide selected teams to investigate promptly and in depth certain selected sightings of UFOs." This led eventually to the Air Force contract with the University of Colorado in October 1966. The project director was Professor Edward U. Condon, a very distinguished physicist and a man of strong and independent character. Work on this contract was carried out over a two-year period with a substantial scientific staff, resulting in the publication of the "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" in January 1969. Consequently, on December 17, 1969, Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans, Jr., announced the closure of Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book officially closed on Jan 30, 1970. NOTES TO THE READER Jim Giglio NCAS Coordinator, Condon Report Project 1. General 2. Organization and Linking 3. "Look and Feel" 4. Graphics and Mathematical Expressions 5. Navigating from the Index 6. Conclusion: Which Browser? 1. General Preparing a document for presentation on the web is not the same as putting together an ordinary hardcopy book or report. Hardcopy is linear; the reader typically goes from one page to the next in page number order. But with a web document, scrolling through screen after screen of material (as if they were pages in a book) becomes tiresome very rapidly. So web documents are usually broken up into short segments and hyperlinked so that the reader can click from one item to another without regard to normal page ordering. The Condon Report, even in its original hardcopy, possessed some features of a web document. Being a government report, it presented its conclusions first, followed up by supporting data; these can be read in almost any order. In adapting the report to the web, we have attempted to take advantage of this built-in segmentation while preserving most elements of its original "look and feel." 2. Organization and Linking The basic entry point to the report is by the Table of Contents (a clickable link from the Title Page.) Each entry in the table of contents is also a clickable link, either to: a chapter within a section, a section heading with links to its chapters, an appendix, an index of links to the photographic plates, a separate index of links to the figures, or the index to the entire document. Each case study (there are 59) is also reachable by a set of separate links from the three chapters that contain the cases. Except for a few of the shorter ones, all chapters show a set of internal links to their numbered sub-chapters. These allow you to browse chapters in small chunks; each subchapter also has a "BACK" link that returns you to the top of the chapter, where another link will return you to the table of contents. Where you see an "Introduction" numbered 0, this is due to the fact that the original author provided no numbered introduction, and we have inserted one in the interest of "point & click" navigation. Individual plates and figures have no links; simply use the "back-arrow" of your browser to return to the link that led you to the plate or figure. 3. "Look and Feel" The document we started with was the original report as submitted to the Air Force in 1968, which we obtained from the University of Colorado Library System. It consisted of just under 1400 typewritten pages interspersed with more that 100 figures and more tables than we wanted to count, plus some 65 pages of photographic plates. We have preserved the original organization of the report, even to the point of maintaining its original pagination (page breaks show the page numbers in double square brackets, like this: [[666]].) We have not been slavish about it, however; the text appears in whatever font you choose from your browser's option settings, and as you adjust the borders of the browser window, the text will re-wrap to adjust to the new margins. We have also taken some liberties with the original appearance of the tables, as tables prepared on a typewriter tend to be unsightly and difficult to read. From time to time in the text, you will see editorial notes that explain significant deviations from the original appearance and/or organization of the text or graphics. Examples include: Exchanging the horizontal and vertical axes of a table or graph, Correcting the numbering of subchapters, Correcting the text references to figures or tables, or Noting odd discrepancies, such as an absence of footnotes to correspond to bracketed numbers in the text. The colored blocks on the title page are the only ones you will see; the original report had essentially no decorative elements in it whatever, and we saw no reason to deviate from that policy; the report stands or falls on its information content and its scientific methodology, not its color scheme.