Many of the UFO investigations, Condon wrote, were a waste of time. He openly wondered why, if aliens were here, they did not simply announce themselves. The entire matter of alien visitation would be settled in a few minutes, he wrote,
if a flying saucer were to land on the lawn of a hotel where a convention of the American Physical Society was in progress, and its occupants were to emerge and present a special paper to the assembled physicists, revealing where they came from and the technology of how their craft operates.
While conceding the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere (ILE), he rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The distance between stars, argued Condon, is simply too vast to allow for practical communication.
This is a key element of the report. One may wonder why, with such an opinion, would it be necessary to study any UFO reports with a view toward a possible ET explanation? Condon’s answer was, no reason at all. More than any other reason, this probably explains why Condon himself never investigated any UFO reports for the project. Despite his statements about the need for scientific objectivity and clarity in the study of UFO reports, it is clear that Condon’s own position of UFOs, while based upon contemporary scientific theory and knowledge, nevertheless was fundamentally antiempirical, and therefore antiscientific.
In passing, we may note that Condon also ruled out experimental, classified aircraft as the primary source of UFO reports, since he thought it unlikely that any nation would test its secret aircraft over different countries.
The report also included summaries of the project’s various types of studies: field studies, photographic evidence, direct physical evidence, indirect physical evidence, optical and radar cases, and astronaut sightings. Roy Craig was the workhorse of the group, writing three of these reports: field studies, direct physical evidence, and indirect physical evidence. Each time, he concluded that the available evidence did not point toward extraterrestrial answers.
In the field study section, Craig conceded that some of the past cases suggested something extraordinary. A few, such as the Great Falls, Montana, case, appeared to show evidence of air force deception. Others, such as the RB-47 report, would, if accurate, represent an unusual and puzzling phenomenon, “which, in the absence of additional information, must be listed as unidentified.” Moreover, while witness testimony could never be taken without reservation, some cases involved testimony which appeared to describe experiences explainable “only in terms of the presence of strange vehicles. These cases are puzzling,” wrote Craig, “and conclusions regarding them depend entirely upon the weight one gives to the personal testimony as presented.” He concluded, however, that early cases such as these took place too long ago to offer much hope of obtaining significant data about the objects sighted. Ultimately, Craig, like Condon, doubted the value of UFO field investigations. Even if an alien culture were visiting us, “such a report would be buried in hundreds or thousands of similar reports triggered by ordinary earthly phenomena.”
Craig’s section on direct physical evidence concerned reports dealing with crop circles, impressions in the ground, alleged pieces of UFOs, and the like. Unfortunately, there were no physical tests, he said, which could determine the origin of imprints at a landing site. Even when the impression was real and conceivably from a large saucer, “it was impossible to establish as factual the claims that the imprints actually were made by an extraordinary object or being.” Heavily compacted soil allegedly caused by UFO “landing legs,” for example, could theoretically be achieved with a sledge hammer. The main feature of this section was Craig’s analysis of the Ubatuba fragment, which did not prove to have the unusual purity of magnesium as claimed and did not show a unique or unearthly composition. (APRO responded that this fragment was not the same kind of fragment that had been submitted earlier and which had been destroyed by air force tests.)
