Tag: Edward J. Ruppelt

Alien Investigation Series ‘Project Blue Book’ Promises More Weird Encounters in Season 2

 

Article by Elizabeth Howell                        January 28, 2020                         (space.com)

• The History Channel’s hit television series, “Project Blue Book”, is back for Season 2. The show, which airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST and PST, follows the U.S. Air Force “investigation” into UFOs during the 1950s and 60s. Under Blue Book, Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt and astronomer J. Allen Hynek and their successors examined over 12,000 UFO sightings. The HISTORY show delves into some of the 700 still-unexplained encounters.

• Series creator and executive producer David O’Leary said that he became convinced that UFOs really existed through his research on Project Blue Book. He is quick to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are extraterrestrial. O’Leary says that in the end, both Ruppelt and Hynek themselves became convinced that UFOs were real and represented a true mystery worthy of scientific study. “Something clicked for me,” said O’Leary, “This is unbelievable (to me). So this ….series … examines this (UFO) program through the eyes of these two men.”

• O’Leary has spent many hours reading the first-hand research from both Blue Book, via the declassified documents found in Hynek’s book The UFO Experience, and from independent UFO historians. O’Leary interviewed the last living director of Blue Book — Robert J. Friend, who died in June 2019 at age 99. Friend provided not only details of the investigations, but advised them on what the Blue Book offices looked like and details of the show’s set.

• The ten episodes of Season 1 of Project Blue Book ran between January and March 2019. Last year’s show topics included a “dogfight” with a UFO over Fargo, N.D. in 1948; “foo fighters” during World War II (Friend was a WWII fighter pilot himself); and UFOs buzzing Washington DC in the summer of 1952. O’Leary says he likes to mix it up and explore scenarios beyond traditional UFO sightings in the sky, such as chasing aliens through the forest, making telepathic connections with aliens, and a Kentucky family that reported an alien home invasion.

• Anything beyond Season 2 has not been confirmed. But O’Leary and his team say they “have a lot of new ideas and areas to explore” and would be interested in producing more episodes.

 

“Project Blue Book,” the hit television docudrama about the U.S. military’s investigations into aliens more than 50 years ago, is back for Season 2.
The History Channel series runs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST and PST — check your local listings to confirm the time in your viewing area. The next episode is tonight (Jan. 28).

                    David O’Leary

The series shares the same name as the real-life U.S. Air Force investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which was called Project Blue Book. That investigation launched in 1952 and continued until 1969. Experts examined more than 12,000 UFO sightings (of which more than 700 are still unexplained), according to series creator and executive producer David O’Leary.

“For me, UFOs have been a lifelong obsession,” he told Space.com. “I have always been fascinated by the question [of] ‘Are we alone in the universe? And I never felt you could honestly answer that question without examining the UFO issue.”

O’Leary said through his research on Project Blue Book, he became convinced that there “really is a phenomenon” of UFOs, even though experts often debunk the purported sightings, or say that the existence of UFOs doesn’t necessarily mean that aliens are in our airspace.

“Once I learned the chief of scientific consultants for the U.S. Air Force [J. Allen Hynek] and the first director of that program [Edward J. Ruppelt] both became convinced through this program that UFOs are real and represent a true scientific mystery and worthy of true scientific study, something clicked for me. This is unbelievable. So this is a drama series that examines this program through the eyes of these two men.”

O’Leary has spent many hours reading the first-hand research from both Blue Book, via the declassified documents in Hynek’s book “The UFO Experience” (Regnery, 1972), and from independent UFO historians. The producer also interviewed the last living director of Blue Book — Robert J. Friend, who died in June 2019 at age 99. Friend not only provided details of the investigations, but also discussed matters such as what the project’s offices looked like. His testimony helped with the sets on the show, O’Leary said.

2:14 minute trailer for Season Two of ‘Project Blue Book’ (HISTORY YouTube)

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George Adamski Got Famous Sharing UFO Photos and Alien ‘Encounters’

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Article by Greg Daugherty                           January 9, 2020                           (history.com)

• George Adamski is perhaps the most famous UFO contactee and is certainly one of the most controversial characters in UFO history. Throughout his life, Adamski took photos of UFOs, wrote books and told stories of his encounters with human-like extraterrestrials from other planets in our solar system, gaining international fame as well as criticism.

• Adamski was born in Poland in 1891, coming to the U.S. with his parents and growing up in northern New York state. He had little formal education. In 1934, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he had lived in Tibet as a child, and planned to establish the first Tibetan monastery in Laguna Beach, California. In 1936, he told the newspapers that he was going to establish the world headquarters of an organization called ‘Universal Progressive Christianity’ in Laguna Beach. He also offered a tax plan to end the Great Depression in 1938.

• After World War II, Adamski’s ambitions turned to UFOs. In October 1946, he spotted his first UFO – a motionless black cigar-shaped craft. In August 1947, he witnessed a procession of 184 UFOs in the sky. By 1949, he’d attached a camera to his six-inch telescope and began scanning the skies. Adamski estimated that he took about 500 flying saucer photos, from which he got a dozen good quality shots. Newspapers and magazines published Adamski’s photos, and he gave lectures on UFOs. He also operated a tiny restaurant with a small telescope set up out back (in a rural area between Los Angeles and San Diego).

• In 1952, Adamski reported that he had met and conversed with a visitor from Venus in a California desert using a combination of hand gestures and mental telepathy, which he recounted in his 1953 book: Flying Saucers Have Landed. His 1955 sequel: Inside the Space Ships, recounted meeting human-like emissaries from Mars and Saturn. Adamski claimed that every planet in our solar system had human-like inhabitants, as did a base on the dark side of the Earth’s Moon.

• In his books, Adamski claimed that his extraterrestrial friends took him aboard a scout ship, flew him to a mother ship hovering over the Earth, gave him a ride around the Moon, and treated him to a colorful travelogue about life on Venus. He said that a 1,000 year-old man shared with him the secrets of the universe, some of which he was not allowed to divulge back on Earth.

• Adamski recounted his meeting in November 1952 with a human-like visitor from Venus in a remote part of the California desert. “The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,” said Adamski. “(His) hair was sandy in color and hung in beautiful waves to his shoulders, glistening more beautifully than any woman’s I have ever seen.” The Venusian had come to deliver a message: ‘Earthlings should stop messing around with atomic bombs before they destroy their entire planet.’

• Project Bluebook investigator J. Allen Hynek called Adamski’s flying saucer photos ‘crude fakes’. Hynek’s Bluebook partner, Edward J. Ruppelt, visited Adamski’s restaurant in 1953 to find Adamski hawking his UFO photos. While Ruppelt didn’t believe him, he wrote that he was impressed all the same. “To look at the man and to listen to his story, you had an immediate urge to believe him,” said Ruppelt, … he had “the most honest pair of eyes I’ve ever seen.” SciFi writer Arthur C. Clarke also denounced Adamski’s work and called his believers “nitwits.” But in 1959, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands invited Adamski to her palace to discuss extraterrestrials. Adamski is said to have also had a secret meeting with the Pope in 1963.

• In 1961, Adamski published his last book: Flying Saucers Farewell, and continued to lecture widely. In 1965, Adamski predicted that a large fleet of flying saucers would soon descend on Washington, D.C. He died in April 1965 at age 74.

• Since his death, Adamski’s critics have tended to portray him as a harmless, small-time con artist. Others like Arthur C. Clarke and J. Allen Hynek have accused Adamski of discrediting the entire field of UFO research. But Adamski stuck by his story to the end. In his first book, Adamski gave an upbeat but ominous message: “Let us be friendly. Let us recognize and welcome the men from other worlds! They are here among us.”

 

To some, he was a prophet. To others, a laughing stock. Even today, more than half a century after his death, George Adamski remains one of the most curious and controversial characters in UFO history.

Adamski had multiple claims to UFO fame. Starting in the late 1940s, he took countless photos of what he insisted were flying saucers. But experts, including J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant to the Air Force’s Cold War-era UFO investigation team Project Blue Book, dismissed them as crude fakes.

                 George Adamski

Then, in 1952, Adamski reported that he had met and conversed with a visitor from Venus in a California desert, using a combination of hand gestures and mental telepathy.

His story would only get stranger from there.

A star gazer is born

Adamski chronicled his alleged adventures in several books. The first, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), coauthored with Desmond Leslie, recounted his chat with the Venusian. Widely read at the time, it later gained a new generation of fans in the trippy 1960s.

Adamski’s 1955 sequel, Inside the Space Ships, described further meetings, not only with the Venusian but also with emissaries from Mars and Saturn.In Adamski’s telling, every planet in our solar system was populated with human-like inhabitants, as was the dark side of the earth’s moon.

In the 1955 book, Adamski claimed that his new friends took him aboard one of their scout ships, flew him to an immense mother ship hovering over the earth, gave him a ride around the moon and treated him to a colorful travelogue about life on Venus.

Along the way, he was also tutored by a space man he called “the master.” The master, who was said to be nearly 1,000 years old, shared the secrets of the universe with Adamski, only some of which he was allowed to divulge back on earth.

Preposterous as his stories seemed, Adamski became an international celebrity and lectured widely. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands raised a public stir after inviting him to her palace in 1959 to discuss extraterrestrial doings. Adamski supposedly claimed a secret 1963 meeting with the pope, as well.

Adamski soon had followers all over the planet. But not everybody was on board. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not only denounced Adamski’s work but characterized his believers as “nitwits.”

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How the CIA Tried to Quell a UFO Panic During the Cold War

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Article by Becky Little                     January 5, 2020                      (history.com)

• In the 1950s, when Cold War anxiety in America ranged from Soviet psychological warfare to nuclear annihilation, LIFE Magazine published a story titled “Have We Visitors From Space?” that offered “scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” A few months later in the summer of 1952, newspaper headlines blared reports of flying saucers swarming Washington, D.C. During this period, the US Air Force said that reported UFO sightings jumped from 23 to 148.

• the U.S. government worried about the prospect of a growing national hysteria. The CIA decided it needed a “national policy” for “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic.” The CIA convened a group of scientists to investigate whether the UFO phenomena represented a national security threat.

• The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence collaborated with Howard Percy Robertson, a professor of mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology, to gather a panel of nonmilitary scientists. The Robertson panel met for a few days in January 1953 to review Air Force records about UFO sightings going back to 1947. The panel reviewed Project Blue Book investigators Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and J. Allen Hynek and concluded that many of these ‘unexplained’ sightings were actually explainable if you just got creative about it. The panel’s main concern was controlling public hysteria.

• According to former UK government UFO investigator, Nick Pope, the CIA was worried that “the Soviets would find a way to use the huge level of public interest in UFOs to somehow manipulate, to cause panic; which then could be used to undermine national cohesiveness.” The Robertson report itself supports this viewpoint, suggesting “mass hysteria” over UFOs could lead to “greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.”

• The Robertson report, which was released to the public in 1975 (see the Robertson report here), recommended debunking the notion of UFOs in the media content of articles, TV shows and movies in order to “… reduce the current gullibility of the public and … their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”

• News reporter and book author, Leslie Kean, points to a CBS television show hosted by Walter Cronkite in 1966, which a Robertson panelist claimed to have helped organize “around the Robertson panel conclusions”. The program focused on debunking UFO sightings.

• Between 1966 and 1968, the US Air Force commissioned another ‘scientific’ inquiry into Project Blue Book by physicist Edward U. Condon and a group of scientists at the University of Colorado. The Condon Committee concluded that UFOs posed no threat to the U.S., and that most sightings could be easily explained. It also suggested that the Air Force end Project Blue Book’s investigations into UFOs—which it did in 1969. (see Condon Report here)

• UFO researchers have suggested that the government never really allowed the Robertson panel, the Condon Committee, or even Project Blue Book to review the most sensitive ‘classified’ UFO sightings. This is directly supported by a 1969 memo signed by Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender revealing the Air Force hadn’t shared all UFO sightings with Project Blue Book and would continue to investigate sightings that could present a national security threat after the project ended.

• Critics claim that the real goal of the Robertson panel, the Condon Committee, and Project Blue Book was never to identify UFOs, but simply to influence public reaction to them. If so, then the government must have had information about extraterrestrials it wanted to conceal.

• The secrecy involving national security issues gave the CIA and the Air Force the audacity to explain away UFO sightings as “natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.” An example of a cover-up of UFOs that continues to today is the CIA’s claim that over half of the UFOs reported in the 1950s and 60s were actually US spy planes. CIA National Reconnaissance Office historian Gerald K. Haines notes a CIA tweet in 2014 that read, “Remember reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ‘50s? That was us.”

 

     Howard Percy Robertson

In January 1953, the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency had a thorny situation on its hands. Reports of UFO sightings were mushrooming around the country. Press accounts were fanning public fascination—and concern. So the CIA convened a group of scientists to investigate whether these unknown phenomena in the sky represented a national security threat.

                  The Robertson Panel

But there was something else.

At a time when growing Cold War anxiety about the Soviets ranged from psychological warfare to wholesale nuclear annihilation, the U.S. government worried about the prospect of a growing national hysteria. In the previous year, UFOs had begun to figure prominently in the public conversation. In April 1952, the popular magazine LIFE published a story titled “Have We Visitors from Space?” that promised to offer “scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” In July that year, newspaper headlines around the country blared reports of flying saucers swarming Washington, D.C. Between March and June that year, the number of UFO sightings officially reported to the U.S. Air Force jumped from 23 to 148. Given all the attention UFOs were getting, the CIA decided it needed a “national policy” for “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic,” according to government documents.

The Robertson report: The real enemy is hysteria

          Edward U. Condon

To this end, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence collaborated with Howard Percy Robertson, a professor of mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology, to gather a panel of nonmilitary scientists. The Robertson panel met for a few days in January 1953 to review Air Force records about UFO sightings going back to 1947.

Project Blue Book, which had started in 1952, was the latest iteration of the Air Force’s UFO investigative teams. After interviewing project members Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the panel concluded that many sightings Blue Book had tracked were, in fact, explainable. For example, after reviewing film taken of a UFO sighting near Great Falls, Montana on August 15, 1950, the panel concluded what the film actually showed was sunlight reflecting off the surface of two Air Force interceptor jets.

The panel did actually see a potential threat related to this phenomena—but it wasn’t saucers and little green men.

“It was the public itself,” says John Greenewald, Jr., founder of The Black Vault, an online archive of government documents. There was a concern “that the general public, with their panic and hysteria, could overwhelm the resources of the U.S. government” in a time of crisis.

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Two Pilots Saw a UFO. Why Did the Air Force Destroy the Report?

by Greg Daugherty                    August 10, 2018                          (history.com)

• On July 24, 1948, at 2:45 am, twenty passengers and two pilots were in an Eastern Air Lines DC-3 twin-engine propeller plane on route from Houston to Atlanta, flying at 5,000 feet on a clear and moonlit night. The plane was flown by former World War II Air Corps officers and veteran pilots, Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted.

• About 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, the two pilots and one passenger, Clarence L. McKelvie, who was the only passenger awake, saw a 100-ft long cigar-shaped UFO with no wings, and having an upper and lower deck of windows. They could see bright light glowing through the craft’s windows. Underneath the craft was a glow of blue light. And it had a flame shooting out from the back of the craft.

• As the UFO seemed to be heading right for them, Chiles said, “We veered to the left and it veered to its left, and passed us about 700 feet to our right and about 700 feet above us. Then, as if the pilot had seen us and wanted to avoid us, it pulled up with a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear and zoomed up into the clouds.” All three witnesses watched the craft for ten seconds before it disappeared from view into the clouds.

• The pilots made drawings of the craft and made written statements. (Chiles’ statement; Whitted’s statement) They both provided further details in subsequent newspaper and radio interviews.

• An Air Force department known as the “Air Technical Intelligence Center” reported that in its estimation, the UFO craft was ‘interplanetary’. When this classified report reached Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, he outright dismissed any extraterrestrial connection. The Air Force was already convinced that these mysterious craft was Soviet spy technology, even though the Soviets wouldn’t even have the A-bomb until a year later. So the intelligence report was unceremoniously declassified and destroyed.

• The sighting was downplayed, alluding that the pilots merely saw a weather balloon or a mirage. The official Air Force determination was that the pilots saw a fireball or very bright meteor. Consultant to the Air Force’s ‘Project Blue Book’, J. Allen Hynek, claimed in his 1972 book, The UFO Experience that “the Pentagon had declared that the problem really didn’t exist.” Edward J. Ruppelt, the Air Force officer who initially headed Project Blue Book, said that “[T]he Air Force tried to throw up a screen of confusion. They couldn’t have done a better job.”

• But Chiles and Whitted always stuck to their story. In fact, Whitted later added a new twist to the story that he felt he needed to withhold at the time. Whitted said that the UFO didn’t just go into the clouds, but it actually vanished in front of their eyes.

 

Whatever occurred at 2:45 a.m. on the morning of July 24, 1948 in the skies over southwest Alabama not only shocked and stymied the witnesses. It jolted the U.S. government into a top-secret investigation—the results of which were ultimately destroyed.

The skies were mostly clear and the moon was bright in the pre-dawn hours as pilot Clarence S. Chiles and co-pilot John B. Whitted flew their Eastern Air Lines DC-3, a twin-engine propeller plane, at 5,000 feet, en route from Houston to Atlanta. The aircraft had 20 passengers on board, 19 of them asleep at that hour. It was a routine domestic flight, one of many in the skies that early morning.

                 Pilots Clarence S. Chiles
                    and John B. Whitted

Until suddenly, it wasn’t. What the two pilots and their wide-awake passenger saw in the skies about 20 miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, did more than startle them. It would reportedly become the catalyst for a highly classified Air Force document suggesting that some unidentified flying objects were spaceships from other worlds—a tipping point in UFO history.

Chiles described what he saw in an official statement about a week later: “It was clear there were no wings present, that it was powered by some jet or other type of power, shooting flame from the rear some 50 feet. There were two rows of windows, which indicated an upper and lower deck, [and] from inside these windows a very bright light was glowing. Underneath the ship there was a blue glow of light.” He estimated that he’d watched the ship for about 10 seconds before it disappeared into some light clouds and was lost from view.

Whitted offered a similar description in his official statement: “The object was cigar shaped and seemed to be about a hundred feet in length. The fuselage appeared to be about three times the circumference of a B-29 fuselage. It had two rows of windows, an upper and a lower. The windows were very large and seemed square. They were white with light which seemed to be caused by some type of combustion…. I asked Capt. Chiles what we had just seen and he said that he didn’t know.”

The passenger who was awake at the time, Clarence L. McKelvie of Columbus, Ohio, corroborated the pilots’ account that an unusually bright object had streaked past his window, but he wasn’t able to describe it beyond that.

Both pilots also made drawings of the craft they believed they had seen and provided further details in newspaper and radio interviews, some just hours after the sighting. The Atlanta Constitution headlined its July 25 account, “Atlanta Pilots Report Wingless Sky Monster.” In that article, Chiles described what sounded like an uncomfortably close encounter, as the object appeared to be coming at them. “We veered to the left and it veered to its left, and passed us about 700 feet to our right and about 700 feet above us. Then, as if the pilot had seen us and wanted to avoid us, it pulled up with a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear and zoomed up into the clouds.”

Chiles and Whitted weren’t the only ones baffled by what they’d seen.

Asked for comment, William M. Allen, the president of Boeing Aircraft told the United Press he was “pretty sure” it was “not one of our planes,” adding that he knew of nothing being built in the U.S. that matched the description. General George C. Kenney, the chief of the Strategic Air Command, which was responsible for most of America’s nuclear strike forces during the Cold War, told the Associated Press: “The Army hasn’t anything like that. I wish we did.”

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