In the New York area, a number of UFO reports in October centered around Lake Wanaque, a large reservoir in northeastern New Jersey and the main feeder for the Jersey City water supply. In a story picked up by the wire services, tens of thousands of people poured into the area night after night to see lighted objects over the water. The military also arrived, as the reservoir was strategically important. The mysterious lights were not seen over the reservoir per se, but over the small mountain range or range of large hills on the west side of the lake. One resident said such sightings had been in that area for half a century.104
SLOUCHING TOWARDS COLORADO
Throughout the spring of 1966, the air force had sought a university willing to undertake a formal study of UFOs. In August, consideration centered on the University of Colorado, featuring the world-renowned physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon. The announcement would not be made for several months yet, but the team at Colorado was already working to decide how best to handle—or disable—the subject. On August 9, a memorandum was written by the person who quickly became, behind Condon, the number two man of the project. Although he was no scientist, Robert Low was a senior administrator of the university and a former intelligence officer who appears to have performed some serious work for the CIA in Albania twenty years earlier. On this day, Low wrote a memorandum addressed to Thurston E. Manning, the university’s vice president and Dean of Faculties, and Dr. E. James Archer, Dean of the Graduate School. Low’s memorandum laid out the strategy for handling the UFO problem. “The trick would be,” wrote Low,
to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study, but to the scientific community would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer....
The memorandum blew up a year later, after project members found it and leaked it. Ironically, Archer claimed never to have seen the memo until journalist R. Roger Harkins brought it to his attention in November 1967. In Harkins’s judgment, Archer was genuinely shocked when he read it, even though it had been filed in his office. Harkins asked Archer if he thought the memo was deliberately not sent to him; Archer paused, then smiled. “No comment,” he said.
For now, however, preparations seemed underway for a phony study that would placate the public as well as the skeptical, albeit unstudied, scientific community.105
On August 31, Col. Ivan C. Atkinson, deputy executive director of the air force Office of Scientific Research, formally approached the University of Colorado with the request to conduct a comprehensive examination of the UFO problem. This program was to be independent and beyond the authority of the air force. Of course, the CIA was another matter entirely. Moreover, just how independent could the Colorado study be, when it was wholly financed by air force money? For years, UFO researchers had argued that Congress should foot the bill for such an undertaking, an effort that the air force and its allies had thwarted every time. Part of the problem with a congressionally funded program, from the air force point of view, was the obvious loss of control, or at least influence, over the study’s direction. Direct funding, with air force money, would mitigate such a problem, if for no other reason than that the air force itself would choose who would conduct the study. More than a decade earlier, when assembling NICAP’s board of directors, Keyhoe also had understood the value of selecting the right people for the job.106
In August, however, the main UFO news was coming not from Colorado, but the Washington Star. On August 7, the Star carried an article on UFOs by Lt. Col. Charles Cooke, a retired air force officer and former intelligence officer in World War Two. After the war he became founder and editor of the
