On This Day in History: December 17

UFOs and Project Blue Book

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I used to believe. I used to imagine we’d been visited by extraterrestrials. Maybe not anally probing people in trailer parks, but all those sightings and crop circles had me pondering. Then in 1996 I watched a show called Where Are All the UFOs and it made me a skeptic. The show agreed with what the US Air Force had been saying for three decades.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 17, 1969--

The TV show was narrated by Michael Dorn, who played Worf on Star Trek. If you can find it, it does a great job of answering all those “But what about …?” bits of evidence that suggest aliens have been here and … done stuff. The USAF launched Project Blue Book in 1952 to study UFOs, and after 17 years their conclusion was: Not fucking aliens.

Being that it was a military operation, the primary purpose was to assess the potential threat to national security. Note that UFO stands for “unidentified flying object” and that unidentified doesn’t automatically mean fuckin’ aliens, man. It means fuckin’ unidentified. Man. And whether it was aliens or Soviets making a great technological leap forward, the USAF had a massive military erection for making sure its multimillion-dollar Tom Cruise Craft were up to snuff. Hey, pedants. I know Maverick is a Navy pilot. Fuck off. Continues below …

But don’t fuck off from becoming a paying subscriber. All are welcome, including both Star Trek and Star Wars fans. Although you should know that the Scott Bakula Star Trek was an abomination.

A secondary aspect of the project was a scientific evaluation of the fuck was going on. On December 17, 1969, Project Blue Book came to a close, with a three-point summary of its findings: 1. Not a threat to national security. 2. Doesn’t represent some technology beyond our present understanding. 3. Not. Fucking. Aliens. Makes for a boring-as-shit TV show.

They looked at 12,618 UFO reports, and almost all of them were shown to be misidentifications of things like clouds, stars, or actual human-piloted aircraft. Some of those aircraft were secret spy planes, however. However, however, 701 of the 12,618 were classified as “unexplained.” Like “unidentified,” unexplained does also not mean fuckin’ aliens. If you remain unconvinced, you can Freedom of Information Act that shit yourself and see if you can find any Klingons or Cylons or whateverthefuck.

But perhaps you should be skeptical of all the skepticism. After all, the CIA was involved, with the motivation to minimize panic, and “fuckin’ aliens are here, man” is one of those things that can make people panic. In 1952 the CIA’s assistant director of scientific intelligence wrote that some sightings “are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.” What’s more, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the scientific advisor for the project, went into it a definite skeptic, and came out saying “Yeah, well, uh … there is some funky shit we can’t explain.” He said the Air Force did a shit job of investigating, referring to the staff as indifferent, unscientific, and incompetent.

Have aliens visited? Definitely not. Says the gubmint. So maybe they have. Except probably not. Or have they? No.

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