UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry

UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry is a historical narrative published in July 2012 by Anomalist Books and written by a group of authors known as the UFO History Group. The authors consist of Michael Swords, Robert Powell, Richard Thieme, Clas Svahn, Jan Aldrich, Barry Greenwood, Vincente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, and Steven Purcell. The book reviews the history of the UFO phenomenon using government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and from other archival sources. UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry focuses on how governments dealt with the mystery and the challenges of the phenomenon. The book proceeds in chronological order beginning in World War II. This is one of the few books on UFOs written from primary documents. Information is provided in a scholarly context with well-cited descriptions of the exact source materials used. The book is 580 pages and contains three indices and a bibliography of hundreds of different sources.
Contents
Chapter 1, "World War II and the Immediate Post-War Era" describes pilot sightings of UFOs, then called foo fighters, and the U.S. efforts to determine if they were new weapons developed by the Germans or the Japanese.
Chapter 2, "Ghost rockets" covers unusual sightings of rocket-like objects in Sweden in 1946. The chapter describes the reactions of the Swedish and U.S. governments to the ghost rockets and their concerns as to the possibility of a Soviet origin of the objects.
Chapter 3, "The Flying Disks and the United States" addresses the reaction of the U.S. government when flying discs are seen over the continental U.S. in 1947. This is the year when the term flying saucers came into vogue. Included is a memo from Lt. General Nathan Twining to Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington, D.C. that describes the physical and aerodynamic features of the flying discs, states that the phenomenon is real, and recommends that a directive be issued assigning a priority and security classification.
Chapter 4, "A Formalized UFO Project" outlines the first attempt to investigate the UFO phenomenon through the formation of Project SIGN by a USAF Pentagon Directive in early 1948. Included in this chapter is an original Air Force document marked Top Secret that describes the Swedish Air Intelligence's belief that "these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth."
Chapter 5, "Grudge" chronicles the end of Project SIGN and the birth of its replacement, Project Grudge. The end of Project SIGN came with an initial report from the project leaders that suggested an extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) to explain the phenomenon. This report was revised and the project closed. The chapter also describes famous astronomer UFO sighting. Other famous individuals mentioned as being involved with the UFO phenomenon included General Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, Dr. Edward Teller, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and Dr. Theodore von Karman.
Chapter 6, "Duck and Cover" describes the desire to begin investigated UFOs outside of the U.S. Air Force system and the inter-agency competition that ensues. The press and congress enter the foray. The chapter describes how pressure on the Air Force mounts as Edward R. Murrow produced the first extended television commentary on the subject in 1950 and famous news columnist Bob Considine interviewed Air Force officers.
Chapter 7, "Transition" addresses the dilemma faced by the AF Director of Intelligence, General Cabell, when he tried to keep information about UFOs away from the public while instilling the importance of the investigation into his officers. The authors describe a dozen UFO reports that occurred in 1951 from military witnesses at multiple Air Force bases, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and White Sands Proving Grounds. The famed Lubbock Lights and Project Twinkle are also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 8, "Tacking Against the Wind" describes 1952 as one of the most eventful years in the history of UFOs. A year that saw over 30,000 different news stories on UFOs, the first documented case of a military order to fire on UFOs, a major UFO sighting over Washington D.C. that resulted in the involvement of President Harry Truman and a national press conference held by General John Samford. These events occurred under a more benign oversight by Pentagon authorities and the leadership of Captain Edward Ruppelt of the newly renamed Project Blue Book. Another interesting note in this chapter is a furor that occurs when the plane of the Secretary of the Navy, Dan Kimball, is buzzed by a UFO and the Air Force brushes off the report.
Chapter 9, "The CIA Solution" is perhaps one of the most interesting sections of the book. This chapter describes the entry of the CIA into the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. This marked a watershed decision in the history of handling UFO information and the public's interest. Included in the Robertson panel report was the CIA recommendation of an educational program to debunk flying saucers. This chapter discusses the role of famous individuals including CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, Dr. Julius Stratton, Dr. Howard Robertson, and Lloyd Berkner.
Chapter 10, "Intermission" is a short bridge chapter highlighting the impact on military thinking of the hysteria caused by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and also focuses on insistence that no serious funding go to anything but the Strategic Air Command nuclear bombing fleet.
Chapter 11, "A Cold War" reviews the period of 1953-1956 following the CIA recommendation to manipulate the release of information so as to undermine citizen interest in UFOs, and the rise of a Washington, DC-based civilian organization which posed a serious threat to that policy. Dozens of interesting military reports of UFOs are identified in this chapter as well as notable individuals such as aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson, Donald Keyhoe, Dr. Hermann Oberth, and CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Chapter 12, "Something Closer This Way Comes" takes a detailed look at the year 1957, wherein the UFO phenomenon manifested itself in an unusual burst of , (including the Levelland, Texas sighting), the intensity of which caused great problems for the Air Force's policy.
Chapter 13, "Battle in the Desert" describes the long relatively "dead" period (1958-1963) wherein the UFO phenomenon was unusually quiet, but the "political war" between the USAF and the Washington-based civilian organization NICAP was, paradoxically, heated.
Chapter 14, "The Colorado Project" covers the years leading up to the decision by the USAF to hire an academic institution (The University of Colorado) to evaluate the UFO phenomenon, the detailed workings of the project that was headed by Dr. Edward Condon, and the resulting review of the Colorado Project by Dr. James McDonald and other scientists.
Chapter 15, "After the Close of Blue Book" describes the time following the official close of the USAF project from 1970 through the first decade of the 21st century. The chapter takes snapshot looks at the continuance of Air Force policy, plus several instances of particularly awkward UFO manifestations (Loring Air Force Base 1975, Tehran, Iran 1976, Cash-Landrum incident 1980, Japan Air Lines flight 1986, Holland, Michigan 1994, Phoenix Lights 1997, Scott AFB 2000, and Stephenville, Texas 2008) and a look into the formal investigation of the famous Roswell crashed disk claim.
Chapter 16, "The Swedish Military's UFO History" covers the interactions of the military with unidentified aerial objects from before WWII until recent times. The chapter describes a rather amicable relationship between the Swedish Defense Institute and civilian UFO groups.
Chapter 17, "The Australian Military and the Official Government Response" chronicles the Australian government's experience with the UFO phenomenon from the 1950s until modern times. Two interesting cases discussed in this chapter deal with military reactions to sightings by religious witnesses in the Reverend Gill case of 1959 and the Cressy Affair of 1960.
Chapter 18, "UFO Secrecy and Disclosure in Spain" completes the book's three dedicated chapters by non-U.S. native writers. Like the Swedish chapter, the Spanish chapter describes a close working relationship between the government and civilian UFO groups.
Chapter 19, "UFOs and France — Beginnings of a Scientific Exploration" details the significant French efforts to employ a formal science-oriented approach to UFO data collection and laboratory testing when feasible. Two particularly interesting French "landing trace" cases and their laboratory analyses are described in this chapter.
Chapter 20, "Glimpses of Episodes in Other Countries" takes snapshot looks at several UFO/military involvements elsewhere. Highlighted are the Belgium Triangles Wave, the Soviet Union "Gindilis Study", and early military involvements in Brazil.
The book concludes with a summary "Epilogue", a lengthy documents appendix, and several indices.
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* [http://books.google.com/books?id_Xab1hqwco0C&printsecfrontcover&source=gbs_atb#vonepage&q&ffalse Google Books copy of UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry]
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