The Robertson Panel

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

January 15, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E222 How the CIA Tried to Quell a UFO Panic During the Cold War” on Spreaker.

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.”

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.

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

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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Ufology: From Fringe to Serious Science

December 5, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E180 Ufology: From Fringe to Serious Science” on Spreaker.

Article by MJ Banias November 22, 2019 (popularmechanics.com)

• In an interview with MJ Banias of Popular Mechanics, Richard Hoffman and Robert Powell discuss the creation of the ‘Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies’. Hoffman and Powell occupy two of the three seats on the non-profit’s governing board. The purpose of the ‘SCU’ is to establish a scientifically credible organization that will collect “multiple sensory data” on UAPs, such as radar tracks and video, which can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, rather than to simply report and tally random UFO sightings. They intend to publish these studies in a biannual peer-reviewed journal set to begin next year.

• ‘Unidentified Ariel Phenomenon’ or UAP is the current rebranding of Unidentified Flying Objects because the term UFO carries too much cultural baggage.

• The SCU currently has 69 active members who are mostly scientists, former military officers, and former law enforcement personnel with technical experience and investigative backgrounds with companies and agencies such as Lockheed, NORAD, the U.S. Space Command, and NASA. Device physics expert Robert Powell says, “To date, there hasn’t been an extensive and well-funded scientific investigation of these phenomena using state-of-the-art investigative tools and a dedicated investigative team.” The SCU intends to change this.

• Richard Hoffman is a 25-year information technology expert on contract with the U.S. Army’s Material Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Hoffman notes that “The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science.” “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”

• While the SCU doesn’t suppose that non-human intelligence is responsible for UFOs, some scientists have starting to ask more questions in the wake of revelations by the US Navy that UAPs having “capabilities…beyond any known technology” exist, and that the Pentagon ran an Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to study UFOs. The organization has suggested that “the public release of all Navy records associated with (the Nimitz ‘tic tac’ UFO) incident to enable a full, scientific and open investigation is strongly recommended.”

• Still, contemporary ufology makes many academics and scientists nervous. For as long as humans have claimed to have seen UFOs, the established scientific community has been conditioned to consider them nonsense. And the decades-long taboo surrounding UFOs can still kill a professional career. When physical evidence or data has been presented, the well-established ufological conspiracy and myth-making machines set out to discredit that data.

• In 1953, the Robertson Panel was formed at the behest of the government to look at UFO reports after a string of odd aerial objects were seen over Washington, D.C. the previous year. The panel concluded that UFOs posed no risk to national security. Furthermore, it proposed that the National Security Council actively debunk UFO reports and make them the subject of ridicule. The Panel even recommended that UFO investigative and research groups be monitored by intelligence agencies for subversive activity. (see Robertson Panel Report here)

• In 1969, the US Air Force and the University of Colorado produced the Condon Report to close down Project Blue Book (see Condon Report here). A controversial memorandum surfaced that revealed that the report itself had to “trick” the public into thinking the study was objective, but would ensure that the final and official position is that all UFO incidents were hoaxes, delusion and human error. (see memorandum here) UFOs were lumped in with stories of space men from Venus, alien bases in Antarctica, and a subculture of people claiming to be alien channelers, time-traveling ambassadors, and new-age UFO prophets.

• Other UFO study organizations include Project Hessdalen in Norway that monitors strange light phenomena, and the UFO Data Acquisition Project that is designing computer software to monitor and track aerial phenomenon as well as provide metadata that can be analyzed. Alexander Wendt is a political science professor at the Ohio State University who sits on the board of UFOData which also tracks anomalous phenomena in the skies. According to Wendt, neither the government nor the established scientific community are going to fund UFO research. Says Wendt, “I don’t get the sense the scientific community is any more interested or open than it was before. The solution seems to be crowdfunding or finding private donors to invest in these projects.

• In the end, we are simply left to wonder, “What if?” Could the source of some of these data-rich UFO incidents be secret government technology, an alien intelligence, or something fundamentally beyond our physical and philosophical understanding?

• [Editor’s Note] While the purported intention of this article is to bring the UFO community the good news that “real” scientists have stepped forward to conduct “serious” study of the UFO phenomenon, the underlying design of the article, as is typical of this writer, MJ Banias, is to create ‘limited disclosure’ by separating scientifically worthy UFO data from the “conspiracy theories” that deserve to remain on the fringe. I suspect that Banias’ assertive use of the term UAP rather than UFO is also a subconscious cue to treat UAPs as legitimate and UFOs as crazy talk. Soon they will draw a hard line of demarcation as to the type of UFOs that people should pay attention to, and the type that people should not.

The clever Banias employs the mention of past official efforts to stymie UFO research to make his writing seem fair and objective, as if he is “fighting the stigma”. Banias ends the article with the open-ended question “what if” to make it appear that his limited disclosure camp would actually consider that these UFOs might be associated with intelligent extraterrestrial sources interacting with our world – which he doesn’t. MJ Banias can barely wrap his head around the Navy authenticating UFOs with unknown technology. He can’t even bring himself to use the term UFO. To Banias, the existence of anything beyond nebulous UAP sightings is still impossible, belonging to the realm of kooky science fiction rather than mainstream science. Banias maintains the same old dictum: ‘extraterrestrials do not exist, therefore it can’t be extraterrestrials’ while the deep state grins.

For as long as humans have claimed they’ve seen UFOs—and it’s been a long, long time—the established scientific community has more or less considered them to be nonsense. While that hasn’t changed much, even as we’re in the midst of a modern ufological renaissance, some renegade scientists are fighting to bring academic rigor to UFO research.

Take Richard Hoffman, a 25-year information technology expert on contract with the U.S. Army’s Material Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As a Senior Lead Architect, he keeps the Army’s digital infrastructure running and safe from attack.

He’s also a UFO researcher.

“The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science,” Hoffman tells Popular Mechanics. “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”

Hoffman is one of three board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). Unknown or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.

“There are very few UFO organizations remaining today,” Hoffman says. “Of the few that do remain, they each have their unique contributions to the phenomena, but most are in data collection roles versus long term scientific study of cases.”

The difference with the SCU—and it’s a big one—is that it collects data that can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, subsequently generating peer-reviewed papers published in journals and on websites, says Hoffman. The SCU doesn’t collect day-to-day UAP sighting reports, but rather, digs into the more complex cases where multiple sensory data like radar tracks and video may exist.

An Objective of Legitimacy

The SCU played a significant role in studying the Nimitz UFO Encounter, when it released a nearly 300-page report on the incident. The requisite refresher: Two year ago, the New York Times posted a story about Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego in November 2004 and captured video of the object with their F-18’s gun camera.

Earlier this month, Popular Mechanics published a story about several other military personnel who also witnessed the Nimitz encounter on their radar systems and over their ship’s video system.

The SCU paper examined the available public data and testimony available regarding the case and concluded that the “results suggest that given the available information, the AAV’s capabilities are beyond any known technology.”

To be clear, the SCU hasn’t concluded that some non-human intelligence is responsible. Fully aware of the significant gaps in data, the organization has suggested that “the public release of all Navy records associated with this incident to enable a full, scientific and open investigation is strongly recommended.”

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How U.F.O.s ‘Exploded’ Into Public View

August 19, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Laura M. Holson August 3, 2018 (nytimes.com)

• Starting around 11:40 p.m. on July 19, 1952, air traffic controllers at Washington National Airport noticed radar blips speeding near Andrews Air Force Base. The unidentified aircrafts fanned out, flying over the White House and the U.S. Capitol (see photo image above). They vanished around 5 a.m. That morning, Capt. S.C. “Casey” Pierman was leaving Washington National Airport bound for Detroit. Air traffic control told Pierman to follow the unidentified flying objects. Flying over West Virginia, Pierman reported tracking as many as seven bluish-white lights.

• A week later on July 26th, unidentified radar blips were again spotted on radar at Washington National Airport. The Air Force dispatched jet fighters to intercept the flying objects. But every time one of the jets closed in, they disappeared. When the jets backed off, they reappeared. At one point, a pilot found himself in the midst of four unidentified aircrafts and asked what to do. Air control were speechless. Suddenly the objects began to move away. The pilot radioed, ‘They’re gone,” and returned to his base.

• Pentagon spokesman at the time, Albert Chop, told the press that “These things hung around all night long.” The next day, almost every major newspaper wrote about the UFOs. “‘Objects’ Outstrip Jets Over Capital,” was the headline in The New York Times.

• The Air Force and the CIA became worried that the Soviet Union would take advantage of the situation and launch an attack on the United States. Worse, no one could explain the phenomenon to President Harry Truman.

• On July 29, 1952, Maj. Gen. John Samford, the director of Air Force intelligence overseeing the inquiry, held a news conference to reassure the public. He dismissed the Washington sightings as a temperature anomaly. Still, the general conceded that not all the details could be explained by natural causes. Witness reports “have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things,” he said at the time. The New York Times ran the headline “Air Force Debunks ‘Saucers’ as Just ‘Natural Phenomena.’”

• In January 1953, a scientific committee led by Howard Robertson, a well-known mathematician and physicist, was formed by the government to explore the phenomenon. “One of the conclusions was that they needed to debunk UFOs,” said former Army Lt Col. Kevin Randle, who has written a book on the incident, Invasion Washington: U.F.O.s Over the Capitol. The ‘Robertson Panel’ suggested that the government conduct a mass media education campaign to “reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.” The re-education campaign did not work. Few were convinced by the government’s explanation, and UFOs have persisted in pop culture.

• Government officials have sought to publicly debunk the existence of alien evidence ever since the 1952 Washington sightings. Nevertheless, the topic is back in the headlines. Last year, The New York Times wrote about a little known Pentagon project, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, founded in 2007 to investigate UFO sightings. A search of The NY Times’s historical archives reveals a rich bounty of UFO sightings, lore and explanations since the 1950s. And who can forget in 2016 when Hillary Clinton said she would reopen the real X-files if she were president?

• [Editor’s Note] According to sources such as Corey Goode and William Tompkins, the UFOs that buzzed Washington D.C. in the summer of 1952 were actually Nazi spacecraft from Antarctica. After these incidents, President Eisenhower and the U.S. military were pressured into negotiating a truce with the Nazi faction, ultimately clearing the way for a cooperative treaty between the highly advanced Nazi group and the U.S. military industrial complex which endures even today.

In the early morning of July 20, 1952, Capt. S.C. “Casey” Pierman was ready for takeoff at Washington National Airport, when a bright light skimmed the horizon and disappeared. He did not think much of it until he was airborne, bound for Detroit, and an air traffic controller told him two or three unidentified flying objects were spotted on radar traveling at high speed.

The controller told Captain Pierman to follow them, the pilot told government investigators at the time. Captain Pierman agreed, and headed northwest over West Virginia where he saw as many as seven bluish-white lights that looked “like falling stars without tails,” according to a newspaper report.

The sighting of whatever-they-were garnered headlines around the world. And in the decades since, U.F.O.s have become part of the pop culture zeitgeist, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files.” In September, a star of that long-running series, Gillian Anderson, will appear in “UFO,” a movie about a college student haunted by sightings of flying saucers. A “Men in Black” remake is in the works. And the History Channel plans to air “Project Blue Book,” a scripted series about the government program that studied whether U.F.O.s were a national threat.

And the topic is back in the headlines. Last year, The Times wrote about a little known project founded in 2007, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, to investigate U.F.O. sightings. A search of The Times’s historical archives reveals a rich bounty of U.F.O. sightings, lore and explanations since the 1950s. And who can forget in 2016 when Hillary Clinton said she would reopen the real X-files if she were president?

Captain Pierman’s 68-year-old daughter, Faith McClory, said in an interview last month that her father became something of a celebrity as reports like his in the summer of 1952 fueled fear of a space alien invasion.

“My sister has memories of men coming to our home,” said Ms. McClory, who grew up in Belleville, Mich. (She said they were reporters.) “People were enthralled with the flying saucers,” she added.
Researchers say government officials have sought to publicly debunk the existence of alien evidence ever since the Washington sightings.

“Unidentified flying objects exploded into the public consciousness then,” said Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director for the Center for UFO Studies, a group of scientists and researchers who study the U.F.O. phenomenon. “There was concern in a way you hadn’t seen before.”

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Tag: The Robertson Panel

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

Ufology: From Fringe to Serious Science

How U.F.O.s ‘Exploded’ Into Public View