Because this subject is so widely ridiculed, it is important to stress why it is worthy of serious attention. Stories of strange objects in the sky go far back in time, but the problem received little attention until the Second World War. At that time, military personnel from Allied and Axis countries reported unconventional objects in the sky, eventually known as foo fighters. In retrospect, this development is not so surprising. First, human aviation had become widespread for the first time. Above the clouds, thousands of pilots suddenly had the kind of visibility never before possessed. A second reason was the invention of radar, which extended the range of human vision by electronic means. Most investigators during the war assumed the odd sightings were related to the war itself, the product of anomalies related to their new technologies of detection, or perhaps enemy experimental aircraft.
With that in mind, one might have expected such sightings to vanish after the war’s end in 1945. Instead, they increased. In Europe in 1946, then America in 1947, people saw and reported objects that could not be explained in any conventional sense. Wherever sightings occurred, military authorities dominated the investigations, and for perfectly understandable reasons. Unknown objects, frequently tracked on radar and observed visually, were flying within one’s national borders and, in the case of the United States, over sensitive military installations. The war was over. What was going on here?
During the UFO wave of 1947, American military and intelligence organizations conducted multiple, simultaneous investigations of these sightings. Although the air force was officially charged with investigating them, it was never the only game in town. Every service was involved. The FBI investigated UFOs for a while, and by 1948 at the latest, the CIA initiated an ongoing interest.
Initially, some Americans feared that the Soviet Union might be behind the “flying saucer” wave. This possibility was studied, then rejected. At a time when the world’s fastest aircraft approached the speed of 600 mph, some of these objects exceeded—or appeared to exceed—1,000 mph. What’s more, they maneuvered as no aircraft could, including right-angle turns, stopping on a dime, and accelerating instantly. Could the Soviets really have built something like
Options quickly narrowed. Either this was something real and alien, or it was something “conventional” but as yet unknown or unexplained. But what could explain the strong appearance of metallic craft performing the impossible ? By the end of 1947, a contingent of analysts at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base believed that UFOs were extraterrestrial. By the summer of 1948, this team prepared an “Estimate of the Situation,” stating the extraterrestrial thesis that landed on the desk of Air Force Commander Hoyt Vandenberg. As the story goes (there are no official papers proving this, only the statements of several insiders), Vandenberg rejected it, either for lack of proof or because it did not state his desired conclusion. Either way, he made it clear that the air force would not accept speculation about extraterrestrials as a solution to UFOs.
Of course, people continued to see these things and wondered what they were. In the summer of 1952, for instance, UFO sightings were so frequent and often of such high quality that some in the air force actually wondered whether an invasion was under way. With some help from the secret CIA-SPONSORED Robertson Panel of January 1953, the air force improved censorship over the problem. Still, it never quite went away. Civilian organizations began to collect and analyze interesting UFO reports. Moreover, the air force had backed itself into a corner by committing itself to monitoring UFOs as a possible national security threat. Those who criticized the air force’s dismissive statements about UFOs—and there were many such people—frequently asked, if saucers posed no threat to national security, and existed only in the imagination, why did the air force create Project Blue Book to study the reports?
