CONFIRMED
Project Blue Book: The Air Force's Long Study of UFOs
In the years after 1947, when the sighting by Kenneth Arnold and the events at Roswell launched the modern UFO era, the United States Air Force found itself confronting a steady stream of reports of unidentified objects in the sky — some from credible witnesses, some tracked on radar, all demanding some kind of official response in the anxious atmosphere of the early Cold War. The Air Force's answer was a series of official investigations, culminating in the longest and most famous of them: Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 until 1969 and became the definitive government study of UFOs of its era. Over those seventeen years, Blue Book collected and examined more than twelve thousand reported sightings, seeking to determine what people were seeing and whether any of it threatened national security or represented technology beyond human capability. Its investigators concluded that the overwhelming majority of sightings had ordinary explanations — misidentified aircraft, weather balloons, stars and planets, atmospheric effects, and hoaxes — and that none of the cases provided evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles. Yet Blue Book also left behind a residue of several hundred cases that it could not explain, and it became the focus of a lasting controversy: was it a serious scientific effort that reached an honest, if unexciting, conclusion, or was it, as critics including its own scientific consultant came to argue, more a public-relations exercise designed to explain sightings away and reassure the public than to study them seriously? This is the story of Project Blue Book, of what it found and what it did not, and of the argument over how a government should investigate the unknown.
