Sanderson speculated that “aliens” operating UFOs could be artificially intelligent, or perhaps that even some of the machines among UFOs “might also be ‘alive,’ having been constructed along biological rather than mechanical principles.” Machines, he wrote, need not be made only of metal or ceramics. May they not be of “plastics and colloids; or colloids and gases; or even ... ‘nonmaterial’ altogether?” Machines patterned on life-forms would always be better, more efficient, and more reliable than anything we can think up and construct with metal, nuts, and bolts. Such creatures could range from having a very high order of intelligence, to being a type of drone. Interestingly, in the early 1990s, Manuel de Landa, a writer on artificial intelligence and warfare, argued that we were perhaps not far away from creating machines that would blur the distinction between “real” and “artificial” intelligence.
Sanderson’s collected evidence made it “painfully obvious” to him that, at the very least, these intelligences were “either acting in consort or along parallel lines of endeavor ... surveying and studying our planet and its life-forms.” Quite possibly, there are whole masses of aliens “either muscling in here or sharing in the enterprise.”
Sanderson shopped his ideas and reports throughout U.S. Naval Intelligence during the late 1960s. Apparently visiting quite a few departments, he learned that most of the topmost individuals had not read any of the extraordinary underwater UFO reports he had come across. Most thought it was all nonsense until he would make some remark that seemed to get through. The typical result of his meetings, he said, was that officials begged him to send them the reports he had collected.20
THE DEATH OF JAMES MCDONALD
Following the disaster of 1968 and 1969, James McDonald and Allen Hynek tried to keep the UFO issue alive. On January 21, 1970, the UFO Subcommittee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics sponsored a panel in New York City, and Hynek, McDonald, Thornton Page, Gordon Thayer, and Philip Klass attended. The subcommittee, led by Joachim P. Kuettner, consisted of scientists with no previous position on UFOs and reached several middle-of-the-road conclusions. It criticized the NAS position that extraterrestrials were the least likely explanation for UFOs and rejected McDonald’s position that it was the “least unsatisfactory.” The subcommittee determined there was no scientific basis for assessing such probabilities. It criticized the Condon Report, which retained a “small residue of well-documented but unexplainable cases which form the hard core of the UFO controversy.” The Condon Report’s conclusions, said the subcommittee, did not match its data. It recommended a moderate-level, ongoing scientific study of UFOs.21
Despite the appearance that UFOs were completely debunked, many people remained skeptical of the official truth as handed down by Condon and the air force. In April 1971, an engineering research magazine,
The worst story of 1971 was the demise of James McDonald. As far as anyone could tell, McDonald was fine all through 1970 and into 1971. On March 2, 1971, he testified as an expert in atmospheric physics at the House Committee on Appropriations regarding the supersonic transport (SST) and its potentially harmful atmospheric effects. McDonald’s opponents questioned his credentials and ridiculed him as someone who believed in “little men flying around the sky.” Laughter broke out several times.
Shortly after this incident, McDonald shot himself in the head and became blind. He was committed to the psychiatric ward of the VA Medical Center in Tucson. In June, he signed himself out. On Sunday morning, June 13, a woman in south Tucson, identifying herself as a doctor, said a deranged blind man had taken a cab to the area. She wanted to know where the driver had dropped him off, and she made several calls. Meanwhile, a married couple and their children, walking along a shallow creek, found McDonald’s body under a bridge at 11:40 A.M. A .38 caliber revolver was in the sand, near his head. A brief note attributed his suicide to marriage and family problems.23
