As he had been everywhere he went for the past few years, James McDonald was the most dominant and noteworthy force to reckon with and made the most lasting impression on the event. He knew this was a last-ditch effort to get UFOs on the scientific agenda. “I am enough of a realist,” he said, “to sense that, unless this AAAS symposium succeeds in making the scientific community aware of the seriousness of the UFO problem, little response to any call for new investigation is likely to appear.” Rising to the occasion, McDonald presented a brilliant paper. Titled “Science in Default: Twenty-two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations,” it is perhaps the most damning statement about UFO research ever made. Speaking before the convention at Boston’s Sheraton Plaza Hotel, McDonald came down hard on everyone: Condon, Menzel, Hynek, and finally the scientific establishment itself. He said:
No scientifically adequate investigation of the UFO problem has been carried out during the entire twenty-two years that have now passed since the first extensive wave of sightings of unidentified aerial objects in the summer of 1947.... In my opinion, the UFO problem, far from being the nonsense problem that it has often been labeled by many scientists, constitutes a problem of extraordinary scientific interest. The grave difficulty with essentially all past UFO studies has been that they were either devoid of any substantial scientific content, or else have lost their way amidst the relatively large noise content that tends to obscure the real signal in the UFO reports.
He criticized mainstream scientists for complacency in not recognizing the “signal” from the “noise” in UFO reports and expressed dismay over the probable bleak future of UFO research in the aftermath of the Condon Report. McDonald also went after Project Blue Book and J. Allen Hynek:
The assurances that substantial scientific competence was involved in air force UFO investigations have, I submit, had seriously deleterious scientific effects.... My own extensive checks have revealed so slight a total amount of scientific competence in two decades of air force-supported investigations that I can only regard the repeated assertions of solid scientific study of the UFO problem as the single most serious obstacle that the air force has put in the way of progress towards elucidation of the matter.
Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book had conducted “scientifically meaningless investigations.” The UFO panels and studies commissioned by the air force had all brought “almost negligible scientific scrutiny into the picture.” This was a direct hit at the Robertson Panel, and thus Thornton Page, who sat listening. The Condon Report was “quite inadequate,” padded with fluff, but unable to hide the fact that it studied only “a tiny fraction” of the truly difficult UFO reports. Its level of argumentation, said McDonald, was “wholly unsatisfactory.” He added:
Furthermore, of the roughly ninety cases that it specifically confronts, over thirty are conceded to be unexplained. With so large a fraction of unexplained cases ... it is far from clear how Dr. Condon felt justified in concluding that the study indicated “that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
Finally, the National Academy of Sciences came under McDonald’s censure :
That a panel of the National Academy of Sciences could endorse this study is to me disturbing. I find no evidence that the academy panel did any independent checking of its own; and none of that eleven-man panel had any significant prior investigative experience in this area, to my knowledge.
There was no one else like James McDonald. He was a first-rate scientist, on a mission, afraid of nothing, able to say precisely what he meant. But McDonald by himself could not turn the situation around, and he knew it. One suspects he was speaking to posterity. While his passion may have impressed, it failed to persuade. Sagan rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis, much as Condon had,
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