Ancillary Mercy полностью

Point well taken. It seems odd, does it not, that following such a grave crisis of well-documented UFO sightings from 1952, the best the scientific-military-intelligence establishment could come up with was ... the Robertson Panel? A study of the problem that was, from a scientific perspective, utterly inadequate and inept? On the face of it, it makes no sense at all.⁷⁸

After all these years, the Robertson Panel still leaves a bad taste. In part, this is because Nobel-caliber scientists were involved in such scientifically shallow and deficient work. Berkner showed up just in time to put his name on the final document. The rest sat around for a few hours—precious time away from busy calendars—to listen to a few presentations, probably feeling bored with a subject they all believed was nonsense long before they arrived. Would the CIA really entrust policy-making authority to a group which, prestigious though it certainly was, was unable to render an informed decision on the subject? Here we arrive at the core meaning of the Robertson Panel: a group that, by its very prestige, was able to sanction a policy already decided upon. Within the classified as well as the public world, it is always a good idea to cover your vulnerable areas. What better way than with a panel composed of Nobel-caliber scientists needed to help defuse the UFO problem, certainly not to figure it out. This is the point that the people at Battelle missed. What the CIA and air force wanted was not an actual study of the problem—they had enough of those already. What was needed, and fast, was adequate justification for a policy decision.

The policies that followed as the result of the Robertson Panel, what we may with justice call the true crackdown against UFO publicity, were not the result of the Robertson Panel’s decisions. They were the result of the same policy that created the panel itself, and which since the summer of 1952, had determined that UFOs were finally and truly going to go to sleep, as far as the public was concerned.

ROBERTSON PANEL: AFTERMATH

On January 20, 1953, Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as the thirty-fourth U.S. President. On that day, Robertson wrote a letter to his good friend Chadwell, stating “perhaps that’ll take care of the Forteans for a while.” (This referred to followers of Charles Fort (1874-1932), author and early collector of UFO reports.) Robertson also mentioned a scheduled meeting with the “NSA group” on Thursday, February 5. Robertson, clearly, was well plugged in with both the CIA and the NSA, the mere existence of which was unknown to the American public and its elected representatives.⁷⁹

The Battelle Report, incidentally, remained secret until the air force deemed it useful to publish in October 1955. Its conclusion, essentially identical to that of the Robertson Panel, was that it was “highly improbable” that any UFO reports indicated technological developments “outside the range of present-day scientific knowledge.” An interesting difference with the Robertson Panel was that the Battelle study actually had data. Unfortunately for the report, the data contradicted the conclusion by conceding a UFO “unknown” rate of 22 percent for the period 1947-1952 (434 unknowns of a total of 2,199 reports analyzed). No wonder the people at Battelle had been unhappy with their data back in December 1952. None of this mattered, however, as the negative spin of the 1955 air force press release predetermined the media response. For added insurance, the air force released a paltry one hundred copies of the report, so that no one really got a chance to read it anyway. Hynek later called the Battelle Report a “shamefully biased interpretation of statistics to support a preconceived notion.”⁸⁰

On January 24, Ruppelt was off to Ent AFB in Colorado Springs to give a one-hour briefing for the 4602nd. Something interesting must have occurred, as in February, Benjamin Chidlaw (commander of continental air defenses at Ent AFB) told future UFO researcher Robert Gardner that he had “stacks of reports about flying saucers. We take them seriously when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.” On March 5, 1953, General Burgess (commander of Ent AFB) sent a memo to Air Defense Command and the director of intelligence at Ent AFB. Titled “Utilization of 4602nd AISS Personnel in Project Blue Book Field Investigations,” the memo suggested that field teams of 4602nd personnel interview UFO witnesses. ADC approved the plan a few weeks later.⁸¹