Disinformation also prevailed in the world of UFOs. A January 7, 1955, Air Force Information Services Letter ordered silence over UFOs. Air force public relations officers began issuing UFO fact sheets containing a few (occasionally mathematically impossible) statistics and reaffirmations that the small percentage of undetermined unknowns were harmless. The ATIC UFOB Guide was ready by mid-January and sent to the 4602nd AISS. It contained guidelines for follow-up investigations and examples for identifying UFOs. Despite the new guide, a month later (February 15), ATIC sent a memo to 4602nd officer Major Cybulski. The high number of unknowns recorded by the 4602nd was unacceptable. Instead:
... it is necessary that both the 4602nd AISS and the ATIC strive to reach as many case solutions as possible, thereby reducing the percentage of unknowns to a bare minimum.137
The message: solve as many cases as possible before sending them to ATIC. These solutions did not need to be strictly scientific. That is because most UFOB cases, according to the memo, “when sufficient information is contained, will fit
A month later, the air force revised the UFOB Guide again, ordering investigators to use “common sense” in identifying UFOs. This ruled out the possibility that the witness saw anything truly extraordinary. The policy worked: unknowns for 1955 became a mere 5.9 percent and remained low for years. Interestingly, the AISS Squadron Guide of March 15 mentioned that ATIC was dissatisfied over not receiving UFO reports quickly, or even at all in a number of cases.139
What was Blue Book in 1955? It was an organization that (1) claimed to be the sole repository of military UFO reports, but was not; (2) was under orders to use any means necessary to identify UFOs as conventional objects, regardless of how strained the explanation became; (3) intentionally misled the public with meaningless and even fictitious statistics; and (4) had a barely breathing investigative capability. The conclusion is self-evident: Blue Book was the mask worn by the air force for public viewing. Its UFO reports and evaluations—intellectually dishonest in the extreme—can therefore have no scientific value whatsoever. The fact that the U.S. military and other official sources continue to use them tells us more about the organizations than it does about UFOs.
Much of the foregoing also applies to the 4602nd, which was determined to keep all UFO explanations conventional, no matter how strained. In late May 1955, at the Fifth AISS Commanders’ Conference, on the subject of UFOs, it was stated that the “general public [was] not qualified to evaluate material propounded in science fiction.” Such “absurd and fantastic theories” as spacemen were “given credence solely on the basis of ignorance.” An investigator had to be careful in evaluating UFO reports, depending on what the witness believed about the sighting:
Abnormal predisposition to attach belief to the more fanciful aspects of UFOBs, e.g. “Flying Saucers” would tend to negate the source’s reliability as a factual observer.
Thus, never believe anyone who believed in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The approach had limited effect on reducing the percentage of unidentifieds. By June 30, the 4602nd AISS reported that of its 194 preliminary UFO reports for 1955, it had made twenty-three field investigations and had twenty-five unsolved reports—an unknown rate of 13 percent. Going back to August 12, 1954, and removing cases of insufficient evidence, the percentage of unknowns was lower: twenty-three unknowns from 306 reports, or about 7.5 percent. In reality, however, none of these numbers mean very much; they reflect little more than the creativity, and at times audacity, of the explainers at ADC and ATIC.140
VOICES IN THE DARK AGES
The period of the mid- to late-1950s may with some justice be viewed as the Dark Ages of the UFO. Effectively marginalized from the mainstream, the little publicity it received was almost all negative. The Soviet Union once again debunked UFOs, declaring on April 30, 1955, that they did not exist.141
