Two months after Keyhoe informed Saunders that NICAP had withdrawn its support of the Colorado Project, he continued to keep the door open. On November 14, 1967, he wrote separate letters to Condon and Low, asking if they would agree to investigate NICAP’s UFO evidence. Their responses, both sent on December 1, were noncommittal but praised the assistance NICAP had provided. Low wrote: “Our working relationships have been excellent.... It would be a great pity if they were terminated.”
Before Keyhoe received these responses, Saunders paid him a surprise visit on November 22. That day, Saunders allowed him to copy the Low memo and encouraged him to share it with NICAP’s board of directors. “I wanted Keyhoe to know,” Saunders wrote, “that I was under no illusions as to the one-sided nature of the Colorado University Study, because I felt that this might facilitate NICAP’s continued support of our efforts to salvage something of it.” Indeed, the internal conflict had only worsened after Condon’s late September meeting with the project members. Keyhoe assured him he would not release the Low memorandum without Saunders’s permission. Around this time, also, Boulder journalist Roger Harkins learned of the memo. The word was getting out.73
On December 12, project members Levine and Saunders, along with project secretary Mary Lou Armstrong, brought Hynek and McDonald face-to-face for the first time since their unpleasant meeting in June 1966. The hope was to get these two to bury their differences and work with them after the project ended. This would be an organization of scientists to promote UFO studies. After an initial clearing of the air, the meeting went fairly well. Hynek left, then McDonald raised the issue of the Low memorandum. This was an unwelcome surprise—how did McDonald know about it? The answer: Keyhoe. (Keyhoe acknowledged that he confidentially told McDonald of the memorandum, but maintained that he did so in January 1968.) Since the secret was out, the project members decided to give McDonald an actual copy.
Soon after the meeting, Levine approached Roy Craig, hoping to bring him on board for the new project. But Craig, a stalwart Condon loyalist, was a tough nut to crack. He considered the suggestion to be “mutiny.” Besides, he said, Condon assured them that all findings and conclusions would be represented in the report, regardless of his personal conclusion. Certainly, Craig was not sympathetic to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, although he later conceded that in some instances, “people can be, and are, convicted of serious crimes by personal testimony of the type we had heard [regarding UFOs].” But Craig believed that something as extraordinary as flying saucers needed more than personal testimony.74
Leaks came from a variety of sources that December. Early in the month, Low leaked information to Philip Klass regarding McDonald’s UFO-related activities in Australia. On December 16, Klass launched a letter-writing campaign to bureaucrats at the Office of Naval Research, asking who had been responsible for funding McDonald’s UFO research in Australia. Moreover, asked Klass, who is funding his upcoming trip to Europe and USSR? The problem was that ONR officially authorized money to McDonald—known to everyone for his interest in UFOs—for atmospheric and cloud research. Of course, as we have seen, ONR had its own history of interest in UFOs. Indeed, ONR replied that it was satisfied with McDonald’s work and had no objections to his UFO research. But Klass wanted to intimidate ONR into discontinuing future funding for McDonald. He succeeded because of his position with
THE SCHIRMER ABDUCTION CASE
Early in the morning on December 3, 1967, a young police officer named Herb Schirmer of Ashland, Nebraska, had what appeared to be an extraordinary close encounter with alien entities. At 2:30 A.M. he noticed an object on the road with flickering lights. Believing it to be a truck, he flashed his high beams. To his surprise, the object took off. It was aluminum-colored and flashed a red-orange beam. His report read: “Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not.” When he tried to sleep, a strong headache and buzzing noise prevented him from doing so. A red welt developed below his left ear.
