Ancillary Mercy полностью

found it difficult to adopt an attitude of judging a case by the potential that it displayed. Instead, we found ourselves discarding case after case because the evidence that might have made them airtight, and that might have been available if we really investigated, was not already handed to us on a silver platter.

After two meetings like this, Saunders was convinced the group was doing more harm than good. As a result, the project hired a University of Colorado law student to write the case book itself, based on the notes.⁴⁷

It occurred to Saunders that although Blue Book was supposed to be sending its reports to Boulder, little was arriving, and most that did was of poor quality and late. Eventually, Saunders and project member Norm Levine traveled to Dayton to determine the problem. What they found disturbed them: thick cases in separate folders adjacent to, rather than in, the main folders. Other cases were stored in a classified safe, and it took some cajoling by Levine to get Blue Book’s permission to look at them. The vast differences between Blue Book’s and NICAP’s reports also bothered Saunders. First of all, there was practically no overlap between the cases. Second, NICAP had much higher percentage of “good” UFO reports—where the object in question was not obviously a meteor or balloon. Another realization sank in: by now, the only witnesses reporting UFOs to the air force were either naive in the extreme or motivated by an overriding sense of duty.

Saunders was also finding problems with Blue Book Special Report Number 14 (the Battelle Report), released in 1955. Low had asked him to provide a statistical analysis of the report, since this was Saunders’s area of expertise. The poor quality of statistical analysis within the report distressed him. He noticed how, “with remarkable regularity, whoever did these statistics combined the categories so as to minimize his chances of finding anything significant.” To make matters worse, the original data, contained in IBM cards, had all been thrown away.⁴⁸

Saunders later wrote that he sensed a lack of teamwork all summer among those with differing views on UFOs and an undercurrent of “mutual distrust and game playing.” He began to wonder whether someone on the project was “acting in a double role” and was certain that others on the project also wondered about this. “The possibility that we were all being played as pawns in someone else’s chess game,” he wrote, “did not help morale, either.” His thoughts drifted back to the summer of 1966, while the air force was wooing the University of Colorado for the contract. At that time, Saunders spoke with Low about the charges of Keyhoe, Edwards, and others that there was a UFO conspiracy on the part of the CIA. Saunders suggested that, if the university took the contract, the project should demand a written draft of its “need to know” from the highest possible level of government, either the president or the National Security Council. If the true story was foul-up, as opposed to cover-up, this affirmation should have been easy to obtain, argued Saunders, especially while the air force was still wooing them. “In fact,” wrote Saunders, “this was my only suggestion about the proposal that was ignored.” That is, it was not established that the Colorado Project had a need to know about all UFO cases. That fact by itself threw doubt over the legitimacy of the study.⁴⁹

Of course neither Saunders nor anyone else surmised Low’s position on the subject of UFOs and cover-ups back in 1966, when he wrote his infamous memorandum in which he stated that “the trick” to the project would be to describe it “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.” But in July 1967, like a body carelessly disposed of, Low’s memorandum finally surfaced. That month, project member Roy Craig was searching through office files—at Low’s suggestion, no less—for unrelated information and found the memo. Craig immediately recognized the seriousness of the problem. In his words, “my stomach caught in my throat.” Norm Levine was sitting nearby. “See if this doesn’t give you a funny feeling in the stomach,” Craig said, handing him the memo. Levine, too, was distressed. Levine showed the memo to Saunders, who felt it “expressed concisely what we knew anyway based on Low’s day-to-day behavior.” Craig, who in his own book disagreed so fundamentally with Saunders about the Colorado Project, agreed with him that the memo’s sentiments were consistent with Low’s actions throughout the project and “clearly implied that we were involved in a whitewash noninvestigation, probably aimed at getting the air force off a public criticism hook.”