The 1,465-page report was the product of a two-year, $500,000 investigation sponsored by the Air Force and conducted by a team of University of Colorado scientists led by respected Physicist Edward Condon. It had been thoroughly reviewed and then approved by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Thus, when the Scientific-Study of Unidentified Flying Objects was finally made public last week, it spoke with authority. Its conclusions all but demolished the idea that earth has been visited by creatures from oth er planets. Despite a few remaining puzzles, there is no evidence, said the report, that UFOs are spaceships from extraterrestrial civilizations and no scientific justification at this time for any further extensive saucer investigations.
The still loyal legions of flying-saucer believers protested indignantly. In Washington, the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) called a press conference to charge that the study ignored "the vast majority of reliable, unexplained UFO sighting cases." Physicist James McDonald, one of the few reputable scientists who side with the saucer buffs, insisted that the Condon group "wasted an unprecedented opportunity" to make a scientific study of the UFO problem. In UFOs? Yes!, a rambling book published to coincide with the release of the Condon report, a psychologist* who was fired from the Colorado team bitterly attacked his former colleagues, their motives and their methods.
Article of Faith. Saucer buffs had good reason to be annoyed. The Colorado investigation destroyed some of their favorite theories with simple, rational explanations for several classic UFO sightings and incidents. Some believers, for example, are certain that saucers come from a planet named Clarion that is always on the opposite side of the sun from the earth and always hidden from terrestrial viewers. With calculations made by U.S. Naval Observatory scientists, the Condon group was able to show that variations in the orbital path of Clarion would soon make it visible from earth. Besides, Clarion's gravity would affect the motion of Venus. Since Clarion has not been seen, and the orbit of Venus shows no signs of mysterious perturbations, the scientists concluded that Clarion does not exist.
A fragment of metal that reportedly fell to earth in 1957 when a UFO exploded in the air above the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was sent to a Washington laboratory for analysis. It had been an article of faith among many saucer believers that the fragment consisted of magnesium more pure than any ever made by man. The lab tests, said the report, suggested an earthly origin; the fragment contained more impurities than commercially produced magnesium.
Another UFO landmark, a "claw-shaped" marking on the dry sand of a beach that was pictured in a special Look issue on flying saucers, turned out to be merely urine-soaked sand. "Some person or animal," the Condon report solemnly states, "had performed an act of micturition there."