UFOs - Leslie Kean [56]
Project Blue Book had been set up as a repository for UFO cases and a place for people to call and file reports of sightings, but in reality it was an understaffed, amateurish public relations operation focused on explaining away UFO sightings, no matter how far-fetched the explanation. Throughout his career as popular public representative of Blue Book for the duration of its operation, Hynek was well aware of the integration of the “training and debunking” tactic within the Air Force program, but ironically, as one of the implementers of the Robertson Panel agenda, he was part of the problem himself.
Years later he admitted that “for nearly twenty years [of Project Blue Book, 1951–1970] not enough attention was paid to the subject to acquire the kind of data needed even to decide the nature of the UFO phenomenon.”12 Hynek was the only consistent presence at Blue Book and the sole scientist. The office was staffed mainly by an ever-changing stream of low-ranking officers with no particular training to prepare them for this line of work, and often little interest in it. Hynek brought some respectability to the Air Force project, though it was never equipped to solve the problem and official prejudice kept it that way.
Despite his eventual transformation after two decades of work with the Air Force, Hynek had earlier stretched logic to its limit in order to explain away as many UFO reports as possible. In his landmark 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, he acknowledged that debunking was what the Air Force expected of him. “The entire Blue Book operation was a foul-up based on the categorical premise that the incredible things reported could not possibly have any basis in fact,”13 he wrote. The Air Force, at least publicly, had dutifully fulfilled the debunking role that the CIA panel had so highly recommended, and Blue Book records are rife with examples of solid cases being given ridiculous, often infuriating explanations, sometimes by Hynek himself. Even as he became more aware of the contradiction in later years, Hynek said he did not want to fight with the military and felt it was more important that he maintain access to the store of data at Blue Book, “as poor as they were.”14
In this vein, perhaps most famous is his “swamp gas” statement, made in 1966. For two days, over a hundred witnesses in Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, had seen glowing unidentified objects at relatively low altitudes, many of them near swampy areas. This quickly became a highly charged national news story, and great pressure was placed on the Air Force to solve the case as quickly as possible. Hynek was called to a packed press conference, one bordering on hysteria, as he described it, where he made the comment that the lights could have been the glow of something called marsh gas, a rare phenomenon that arises from the spontaneous ignition of decaying vegetation. The hostility he faced in the press and among the public for his “swamp gas” explanation was widespread, and the media ridicule he received is now legendary. This time, everyone seemed to recognize that the Air Force had gone too far and crossed an unacceptable line in its debunking.
American frustration with the Air Force’s inability to adequately investigate and address recurring UFO sightings had been building, and many now began to feel that the Air Force was not only incompetent but actually intent on covering up the truth about UFOs. Two well-known figures of this era—Major Donald