What Did Project Blue Book Find? | Unveiled

What Did Project Blue Book Find?

The 20th century was awash with UFOs. Though strange occurrences have (and had) always existed, it was only after the Second World War that the idea of flying saucers, abductions, and little green men really caught on in a big way. And no country is better known for alien visitations than the US, where close encounters became a top tier government matter.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what did Project Blue Book find?

Project Blue Book wasn’t the United States’ first foray into aliens and UFOs, but it was the longest-lived and is today probably the most well-known - beginning officially in 1952 and shutting up shop for good in 1970. The first sanctioned investigation before Blue Book was Project Sign, which was launched in 1947 as a direct response to the famous Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting; that same year, Arnold had claimed to have witnessed nine anomalous objects flying over Mount Rainier. This incident was the progenitor not only for modern UFO sightings but also for the term “flying saucer”, which was invented by reporters to describe what Arnold said he had seen. Project Sign was only active for a year, however, concluding that UFOs needed “more research”. In its wake was born Project Grudge, another state effort to understand UFOs, but one which took a different approach. Rather than trying to actually explain the UFO phenomenon, Grudge was more preoccupied with disproving the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” – the idea that UFOs were alien spaceships. Ultimately, Grudge lasted for even less time than Sign did, and was shelved in 1949.

But neither Sign nor Grudge had yet been able to truly explain what UFOs were and, in the midst of the Cold War, mysterious flying objects were taken increasingly seriously by the US authorities. In fact, a spate of extreme UFO sightings in July 1952 (culminating in what was dubbed the “Invasion of Washington” in D.C.) was taken seriously enough that the CIA formed the Robertson Panel, a group of scientists tasked with judging the severity of the UFO threat. The Robertson Panel met just a few months after the formation of the United States’ third UFO initiative - Project Blue Book - and it provided this small, fledgling department with one of its most important guidelines: that unexplained incidents should be withheld as much as possible from the public, so as not to cause mass hysteria. Keeping the American people calm was seen as vital, because the CIA believed that the USSR could capitalise on a panic around UFOs to launch a surprise attack. So, Blue Book was given a mandate for secrecy as it entered into further operations.

The most important members of Blue Book when it was launched were probably Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, its first leader, and the astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was also on the Robertson Panel. Ruppelt was said to be “open-minded” about the link between UFOs and extraterrestrial vehicles, while Hynek was a leading scientist who started the project a sceptic but ended it slightly less so. Unfortunately, their partnership wasn’t to last; while Hynek remained a part of Blue Book until its closure and then went on to speak and write about extraterrestrials from a scientific standpoint, Ruppelt left in 1954 - just two years after Blue Book’s launch.

The initiative never again had a leader who took ufology quite as seriously and, under the leadership of Major Hector Quintanilla in particular, Blue Book received mounting, heavy criticism from the wider public. People were becoming frustrated and desperate for solid, valid explanations for UFOs, which Blue Book continually couldn’t (or wouldn’t) provide - preferring instead to err toward caution by debunking whenever possible. NICAP, or the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon, was even set up to effectively vet Blue Book as, throughout the 1960s, the US government’s most significant run at understanding UFOs fell more and more out of favour. In the end, Blue Book’s reputation plummeted… with amateur ufologists disbelieving Blue Book reports (most of which served to rubbish the link between UFOs and aliens) and accusing it of being part of a government cover-up, all while the US Air Force branded it a waste of money and resources. Eventually, even Hynek (the one-time sceptic) began publicly disagreeing with certain “anti-UFO” verdicts that Blue Book had reached about various sightings and, in 1969, the order was given for Blue Book to be disbanded for good.

But surely, after investigating UFOs for the better part of seventeen years, Blue Book must have found something? The team behind it examined 12,618 separate UFO reports after all… And, as the ‘60s wore on, one particular explanation repeatedly rose to the surface: spy planes. Specifically, the U-2 and A-12 spy planes, both of which were deemed to look sufficiently weird or unusual to the untrained eyes of the sky-scanning American public. According to state records and Blue Book findings, many of the mid-twentieth century UFO sightings can be explained away simply as secret military tests of stealth aircraft, many of which were carried out at the now notorious Area 51. There’s also, of course, the infamous weather balloon excuse, where various UFOs - including those fuelling the Roswell Incident in 1947 - were officially recognised as errant climatological tools. The balloon explanation has historically attracted scepticism, although some believe that there may have been at least some truth to it - citing the now declassified Project Mogul as a potential reason, in which the US Air Force used high-altitude weather balloons in a bid to detect and monitor Soviet atom bomb tests.

Throughout its run, Blue Book at least proved one thing; that America was the world leader when it came to UFO sightings - a fact perhaps not too surprising when we consider that the States also had the world’s most advanced and enigmatic military in the ’50s and ‘60s. Even the Soviets didn’t investigate UFOs quite like the US did, although there was a USSR equivalent of Blue Book - a state-mandated, joint-operation by the Soviet Ministry of Defense and Academy of Sciences. It launched much later than its US counterpart, though, in 1977, after the famed Petrozavodsk Jellyfish UFO sighting. The Soviet version of Blue Book went on to operate for thirteen years, investigating some 3,000 UFO sightings – with around 300 of those deemed truly “unidentified”. The program only ended when the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, we know that even the event which spurred the Soviets into action - the Petrozavodsk Jellyfish - has been attributed to a satellite launch from a nearby cosmodrome… but, in general, the USSR found many of the same explanations as Blue Book in the US did – explaining most UFOs away as military tests, optical illusions or standard, non-extraterrestrial rocket launches.

But despite its tumultuous history, Blue Book has left no small legacy. Perhaps its biggest contribution to ufology came from Captain Ruppelt in the early days, when he first coined the term “Unidentified Flying Object” to describe the phenomenon that his department was investigating. And despite the constant secrecy, now almost all of Blue Book’s files are available online through both the US National Archives and a website called the Black Vault; a large database compiled by the amateur investigator John Greenewald, who has himself submitted thousands of requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the Blue Book files. Today, the Black Vault boasts more than 130,000 pages of declassified documents! Hynek, too, is still regarded as one of the most influential figures in the field, having collected the original list of “close encounters” for Blue Book, and afterwards having served as a consultant on the 1977 Steven Spielberg movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Significantly, of the 12,618 sightings investigated by Blue Book, 701 of them remain “unsolved” to this day - arguably highlighting the need for even more research into what they were. And, what’s perhaps even more intriguing is that, while the FBI claimed that post-Blue Book they saw no need to further investigate UFOs, in 2017 it was made public that between the years 2007 and 2012 a $22 million program charged with investigating UFOs existed at the Pentagon, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Many believe that other, similarly classified investigations could continue to this day.

Back in the 1950s, Blue Book’s aims at the beginning were simply to gather and study data and ultimately discover whether UFOs were a threat to national security. Though it eventually lost credibility, if you take the team first led by Ruppelt at their word, then the vast majority of UFO cases can be logically debunked as definitely not extraterrestrial in origin - more likely they were an accidental offshoot of top-secret military testing. And, ultimately, even those incidents that Blue Book couldn’t rationally explain did not, according to them, indicate that UFOs really were “extraterrestrial vehicles.” For the remainder of his life, Hynek, now the subject of a History Channel TV show dramatizing Blue Book, encouraged people to look for logical explanations first, before arriving at the alien conclusion… but the alien argument has never truly died down!

In the end, Blue Book created an exhaustive log of UFO sightings, which are now available online for anyone to look through at their leisure. For the most part, they don’t prove anything concrete… But who knows? Maybe the truth really is “out there” and hidden in those thousands of declassified files. And that’s what Project Blue Book found.