Project Blue Book
Project Blue Book was the U.S. Air Force's official UFO investigation program, operating from 1952 to 1969, which documented and analyzed thousands of sightings. The program was closed following the Condon Report, which found that most cases had conventional explanations.
Project Blue Book was the U.S. Air Force's third and longest-running UFO investigation program, operating between March 1952 and December 1969 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. It was created as the continuation of two earlier programs, Project Sign and Project Grudge, after the Air Force judged that the phenomenon needed to be documented in a more systematic way.
Operation
The program's task was to collect and investigate civilian and military UFO sightings, and to determine whether they posed a national security risk and whether they had scientific significance. In total it processed 12,618 reports, the overwhelming majority of which were explained as aircraft, balloons, atmospheric phenomena, astronomical objects or other misidentifications; 701 cases remained unidentified. The program's first head, Captain Edward Ruppelt, officially introduced the term "unidentified flying object" (UFO). Its scientific consultant was astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who had already worked on the predecessor programs. Over time Hynek became increasingly critical of the program's methods; he later founded the CUFOS UFO research center, and the "close encounter" classification also originated with him.
Closure and assessment
In 1966 the Air Force commissioned the University of Colorado to conduct an independent study led by physicist Edward Condon. The Condon Report, completed in 1968 and released in January 1969, concluded that further scientific study of the UFO phenomenon was not justified and that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial origin. On that basis, on December 17, 1969, the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book. The report's methodology and conclusions have remained controversial ever since: some researchers, including Hynek, believed that the cases that remained unexplained would have deserved more thorough analysis. The program's records are now publicly accessible for research at the U.S. National Archives.
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