How Project Blue Book Worked, Pt I

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff. You should know a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Choke Brian over there,
and there's Jerry over there. She s all dressed up
in a silver jump suit as usual, a jump suit.

(00:23):
I said, I pulled it out. Should we edit that
out and retake it? No? I think we should leave it? Uh,
Jerry behind the scenes stuff everyone. Jerry sometimes has to
get what's called room tone, which means she has to
roll tape digitally and we have to be completely silent
for a few moments. We get the tone of the
room for I don't know, purposes of magic. And every

(00:46):
time she's done that, we always have the urge to
giggle or fart or be six year old. So she
looks at us sternly the whole time during that five
or six seconds of room. Man, it's so funny. I
don't know what that instat does. And that's just like
we can't sit here for five seconds and not speak
without cracking a joke. We've got a bit of the
class clown in us, I think is what it is.

(01:09):
I sure did still do. Oh yeah, Were you a
class clown? Really? Yeah? But on the downland, Like I
wouldn't fire out something for the whole class to hear
unless I knew it was like comedy gold. But I
would work my circle around me, you know. Yeah, you're
a regional act. I was fairly disruptive, okay, but it
was always fun. So teachers liked me. But they were

(01:29):
just like, just shut up though? Sometimes? Were your parents
were educators so you knew where the line was? Right?
Were you going over the line because you could get
away with it? No? I mean they weren't teachers. I
mean that's actually that's not true. My dad was the principle.
But I didn't start real cutting up till high school.
I got you. Why are we talking about this? I
don't know. I'll tell you why, chuck, because it reminds

(01:50):
me of Henny Youngman. It just so happened to be
around the peak of his career on June four seven.
Did you fact check that? Okay, because then we're going
to get a letter. Henny Youngman's career peak was in
you morons, you do get paid during a government shutdown? Oh? Yeah?

(02:13):
And are we going to correct that now or should
we do it a listener mail, No, we might as
well correct it now. Yeah, so I got it wrong
big time, and we heard from apparently everybody. Nine thousand
of our million listeners are government employees who worked through
the last shutdown, because all of them email in and said, hey,
by the way, whether you worked or not, if you
were furloughed, you were. You got back paid this time.

(02:37):
But you we were right. It does take an act
of Congress. That doesn't happen automatically. What does this take
an Act of Congress? Yes, it does. So we got
that one wrong. I got that one wrong. Chuck went
along with it for the went along for the usual. Yeah, sure, yeah,
that sounds good. Josh, whatever you say, I want to
get your back you know, I appreciate that. So anyway, um,
back on j seven, it was a very important day

(03:01):
because you can use this day to basically pinpoint the
moment that America's just ongoing fascination with UFOs and by extension,
aliens began. It did not exist basically before that time. Yeah.
Why do you think that is? Because I think a

(03:22):
a skeptic and we're gonna talk a lot in this
episode about skeptics and believers. For lack of a better word,
Skeptics would say, like, while all of a sudden, that
UFOs just start appearing, right, And I think there are
some answers to that. Oh yeah, like I don't know,
maybe they just found it or maybe they just decided
to start poking around our airspace. Well, that presumes that

(03:45):
there is actual like UFOs and extra, yeah they do.
You have another explanation for if there isn't a they, Well,
maybe just um newspaper I mean, were there no like
even newspaper reports pre I know all of it began
on June ninety all right, Well then my answer is

(04:05):
the aliens started their business then on that day, Okay,
and I mean there would have to be a basically
a day zero if that ever really did start somewhere? Yeah,
why not seven? Who knows? They may have been zipping
around with the dinosaurs maybe, but the dinosaurs didn't put
that on the news. Nope, did they see that. Well,
they didn't preserve any of their own news reels. At

(04:27):
the very least that's true for me. The explanation is
mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, that kind of stuff. Alright,
So on June there was a man named Kenneth Arnold.
He was a pilot to private pilot, not a private
in the army who was a pilot, private sector pilot.

(04:48):
I think that really got across with the private pilot. Uh.
And he had a good reputation. He wasn't some uh
he was known around town as a respectable business guy.
And he was flying near Washington Mount Rainier and he
was looking for down plane. I guess he was a
search and rescue guy. Hey, I think he was just
helping out maybe a similar pre civil air patrol. It

(05:11):
was or right around the time that it started, Okay,
but even still, I think he was just being like
a good samaritan. He had his own plane and was
helping like and he saw and this is a quote,
uh nine saucer like things flying like geese in a
diagonal chain like line, and estimated the speed of these

(05:32):
uh saucer geese to be twelve hundred miles per right,
which really is pretty funny. Well, at the time he
must have been going probably about fifty miles per hour
in his old little prop plane. UM. So part that
was really saying something you wouldn't hardly be able to
see it, I would think, so he he lodges this

(05:53):
report and um, within just a few hours, this is what.
I don't know how this happened, but within a few hours,
the Associated Prescott wind of this. Yeah. The AP is
a wire service, which means like they do the reporting
and they send it out to newspapers for syndication, and
newspapers just print what the AP wrote all over the country.

(06:14):
So the AP picking it up made it national news
almost the same day, basically that this man had seen something.
And in this AP report, the writer coined the term
flying saucers. Yeah, because Kenneth Arnold had called them saucer
like things that we're flying, and he went, let me
just rearrange this in a way that's a little more

(06:36):
gravy flying what flying? What he saw a saucer geese
like goscer geese. Flying saucers worked, And it was a
big deal, and all of a sudden, everyone starts seeing, Um,
we didn't call him UFOs yet. Just keep your pants on,
we'll get there flying saucers, flying saucers or flying discs. Right.

(06:56):
There was even in the San Francisco Chronicle headline that
said flying saucer seen in most states. Now, so that
headline was printed on July seven. Kenneth Arnold saw his
sighting on June, a couple of weeks at tops and
within that time, like so many reports happen that basically

(07:19):
every state had I had a report of a flying saucer.
Now pretty amazing. It was like a floodgate opened. Yeah,
which if you're in the United States Air Force at
the time, is problematic because they were in charge of
security for for anything not on the ground in the
United States. Yeah, the air space. Yeah, I guess I

(07:40):
could count the sea and that's the Navy. So yeah,
I was trying to say it in a more clever way,
but I think they're there, Yeah, you're airspace, and like,
what are we gonna do here? Uh? Is this a
threat to America? Like do we need to start legitimately
investigating this stuff? Right after Pearl Harbor, the Cold War
is starting to heat up a little bit and people

(08:02):
are freaked out and we need to see what's going
on at least. Yeah, people were a little jittery, yeah
over that in that decade in particular, So the Air
Force does decide that it needs to do something, um,
especially at the behest of a guy named Lieutenant General
Nathan Twining, who was the commander of Air Material Command,

(08:23):
and he wrote a memo titled Flying Discs, and he
basically said, we need to figure out what is the
deal with all this because these reports that are coming
in are describing things that shouldn't be possible. So let's
look into this. And he had enough clout that a project,
an Air Force project was created named Projects Sign. Yeah.

(08:44):
This is the first of what will be several projects
which culminated in you know, I think the final one
was just shut down like six or seven years ago,
like officially well twelve. I don't know if it's technically
related to SIGN, but it followed in the mean, I mean,

(09:05):
just projects investigating UFOs by the US government. Yes, like
officially designated investigations. Yeah, that the one you're referring to
was supposedly shut down in two twelve, but some claim
it was never really shut down, as it's usually the case.
So this project Signed technically was originally called Projects Saucer.

(09:25):
Not bad, It's okay. I like projects Signed cooler or more?
It sounds cooler. Um, yeah, don't you think it sounds
very mysterious? Well, yeah, I'll give you that. What is
it related to it's not as good as the next one,
but we'll look at that. Okay. So Projects Signed is
associated with right Patterson Air Force Base. It's assigned to it.
The project is run out of right Field at the time,

(09:47):
outside of Dayton. And if you're a u fologist, you
would say, well, of course it's right Patterson. That's where
they reverse engineer all the alien technology. So of course
that's where they would investigate it. And they actually do
reverse engineer technology at right Patterson Air Force Base. Then
they have since like World War One when a down

(10:08):
German biplane was captured and they took it to Dayton
and said, figure out how this works. That's a really
interesting job. And project sure, I think reverse engineering stuff
because it's basically copying. I mean I get why they
call it reverse engineering because you're starting at the end
and going backwards. But just to be handed like here

(10:28):
is an enemy, um whatever, it could be a weaponto
yeah whatever, and say, just figure out how it works
so we can build one if we want to, or
if it's not worth our time, then at least we
know how it works exactly, or we can come up
with measures to counteract it, or yeah, how can we
destroy this or copy this? What kind of potatoes are
they using in there? Those new potatoes, they'll put a

(10:51):
hole right through you new potato caboose? Oh yeah, that man?
Was that a real band? Or when you made up?
I can't remember it was real. It's like a little
hipie shake Ban's right. So, uh, the long and short
of it is anytime right. Patterson has mentioned that's when
the you know, who's the one guy that everyone the
meme always posts Aliens man? The other guy from Ancient Aliens?

(11:14):
Is that what it was from which I knew his name?
Do you remember? That's one of the first things that
Aaron Cooper did of us? Oh really was us? Is
the Ancient Aliens guy? One of the first stuff you
should know? Meme copies after Van Nostran's era ended. After
Van Nostran's Reign of Terror, Cooper picked up the thread,
so it might say bean Nostrans continues today his reign

(11:36):
of terror. Yeah, just not photoshop based. So um yeah,
if it's right, Patterson, then people are gonna think there's
something going on there. And like you said, there was
a lot going on there, including very secret projects that
are still going on there. I supposedly that's where they
took the Roswell UH flying saucer, which also happened in
n A lot of people connect those dots, but it

(12:00):
apparently Roswell and the crash and aliens didn't really become
part of like cultural consciousness until the eighties. UM. Anyway,
So and so Project Signs going on, and in a
year after or the following year after Kenneth Arnold first
had a sighting UM, they released a document called the

(12:20):
Estimate of the Situation. And this is these are Air
Force personnel working on Project Signs, okay, and they get
together and they say, you know what, UM, we don't
think that based on some of these these UM, these
sightings and in particular what we consider very credible witnesses
describing very incredible things, that that they have any kind

(12:45):
of origin in US or even USSR technology, and there's
a possibility that these are extraterrestrial in origin. And that
was the basis of this estimate of the situation that
they handed off to UH Air Force, the Air Force Brass,
and the Air Force Brass said, are you out of
your mind? So in the end, the report basically said

(13:06):
we can neither confirm nor deny the very famous line
that everyone uses these days, which basically means there's something
going on. Yes, but remember we we found the place
where that first was cool the Glomar Explorer, right, and
that wasn't until the sixties. So I think this is
somebody using an anachronism here. Yeah, I mean, I don't

(13:29):
think it necessarily said that in the report, but that
was the upshot. Basically they just said it with different
words back then. So, um, here's the deal. Though, there
were a lot of people that worked on this thing
that uh would have probably confirmed. It was kind of
split between people like, maybe there's something going on here
and people that just didn't think so and probably didn't

(13:51):
want to deal with it. Yeah. I didn't have a
sense of just how evenly split it was, but there
were definitely people working on the projects who said they're
extraterrestrial in origin and other people who said, no, there's
we just don't understand it. The Air Force brass like
I said, said, are you guys crazy? You actually made
this document and got their hands on all the copies,
destroyed them all And as a matter of fact, the

(14:13):
Air Force has always denied that the estimate of the
situation ever existed, and that any understanding that it did
exist came from people who did work on Project sign
who said, no, this, this did exist, and this is
what it said, and this is the reaction it got. Yeah,
it's kind of hard not to like because we're both
fairly skeptical, but it's hard not to go down that
conspiracy trail a little bit. Yeah, when you hear stuff

(14:36):
like that report never existed and people that worked on
it like, no, it totally existed, and here's what it said,
here's what it was called. And you know, they just
basically incenterate the thing. You had a copy, I saw
you made the little flower doodles on it. It's hard
enough to go down that road, it really is. And
that's kind of part of the problem with all this
is because there's this um you know, this huge, massive

(15:01):
public um viewing of all of this stuff, reports, suggestions,
it becomes a thing, and at the same time, as
we'll see, the government is simultaneously investigating it and then
denying it, and it created kind of a weird headlock
on on the nation's psyche. Yeah, so there was one
um sighting in Project Signs book and report that doesn't

(15:24):
exist that most everyone was like pretty impressed by. And
that was the uh chills or chillis Childs why did
witted witted? I'm going with childs witted the child's witted
UFO encounter. And that was an Alabama in July of
And this is the beginning of what you will see

(15:46):
as a recurring thing where it's not you know, the
drunk farmer in the field or the college students students partying,
you know in a cul de sac. It's like military
pilots or airline pilots, like people that are trained to
understand aviation and know what doesn't look right. Uh. And
this one was to Eastern Airlines pilots. Uh. They were

(16:08):
flying a d C three and they said they nearly
collided with um. And here's the quote a strange torpedo
shape plying object that looked like quote one of those
fantastic flash Gordon rocket ships in the funny papers. It
didn't really help the legitimacy, but the fact that these
guys described it, that they were so bread at the time,
that they were both trained commercial pilots, it really did

(16:30):
impress a lot of people working on sign and it
did kind of give them this confidence that there may
be something going on that we don't understand here and
we need to investigate this. Right But for the Air
Forces part General hoyit Vandenburg said no physical evidence, no
case exactly, and and he's the one who allegedly ordered
all of the copies of the estimate destroyed, and he

(16:52):
also basically ordered from on high, look, all of this
can be explained something them how, some way, using our
current understanding of science, go make that happen. It's what
came to be known as the conventional explanation paradigm, which
I put this together long enough ago now that I

(17:15):
can't remember if that's an actual thing or if I
coin that. Oh the EP. Yes, it sounds official to me.
It does when you say it that way. But I
also have a very dry style, so it's entirely possible
I came up with that. But that is there are
three things, basically three causes of why somebody might think
they have seen a alien ship under the c EP

(17:37):
under the EP mass hysteria and hallucination, which is what
you think, dogs and cats, hoax, which is that's super
easy to believe that someone Plenty of those have happened.
You remember crop circles. Uh. And then misinterpretation of known objects,
which is a very big bucket that you can toss
things into if you're the military. Yeah, because there's a

(18:00):
lot of weather phenomenon or celestial phenomenon and you can
just make stuff up and say they were looking at
this rubber bands? What it was rubber bands? How are
you going to prove otherwise? You'll note, though, in all
three of those explanations, there are none of them say
extraterrestrials or even secret unknown technology, right, because that's not

(18:21):
conventional or an explanation. While it is an explanation, but
it's not conventional, but it doesn't fit the paradigm. It
does not Uh. And then they actually worked with the
Saturday Evening post Um which everybody was reading at the time,
and they did a two part article which debunked flying saucers.
And this was sort of the beginning of um kind

(18:43):
of like a not kind of like very much a
pr campaign to debunk flying saucers. Should you take a break?
I think we should chuck. We've reached the break part.
All right, We'll move on to Project Grudge right after this. Okay,

(19:21):
So here's the thing though, the Air Force, even if
they really genuinely were like, no, man, there's no such
thing as aliens. Whatever this is, it's just it's just
Americans being freaked out about the Cold War. Okay, let's
just call it that. This is the Air Force brass talking.
I'm doing my best impression of them. Um. They still
needed to investigate him, because the Air Force is charged

(19:43):
with protecting US airspace and there are reports coming in
on a daily basis from all over the country of
unidentified objects flying saucers flying through American airspace. So they
still needed to investigate this. But the Air Force decided
they could investigate it on their own terms, and so

(20:05):
Projects sign was dissolved and replaced by what this is
your favorite name for Project Grudge, which is named so
exactly why, you think, because they didn't want to be
messing with this stuff, they should have called it Project
Uh are you freaking kidding me? Are you joking right now?
I gotta do what do you hear yourself? Um? Yeah,

(20:29):
that was a sort of That was the attitude in
the Air Force at the time. You didn't want to
get assigned. There might have been like one person that
was super into it. I think they were a handful,
but generally you didn't go into the Air Force to
do this, and you were probably irked if you were
assigned this duty. Yeah. I got the impression that this
was something like being stationed in Greenland or Siberia or

(20:50):
Alaska or something like that. Probably not Siberia. That Greenland's nice. No,
it's not. Alaska's lovely, okay, depending on all right, uninhabited Canada, Oh, okay,
can it is great? Anyway, I got the impresson this
is like a backwater assignment where if you ticked off
your your commanding officer, that's they would put you on
Project Oh you should have said South Georgia. Okay, yes,

(21:14):
the worst place in the world. So uh yeah. You
call this the Dark Ages of Air Force UFO investigation
because Project Grudge was um the basic tenant there was.
We're here to debunk these claims, not so much investigate,
but just a debunk. Right, Not only do these have

(21:37):
some sort of conventional explanation, even when they seem like
we don't they don't, We're still going to give them
a conventional explanation because that's it. Because these are not
extraterrestrials and we're sick of this s word. Yes, that's
what the Air Force said, that's right. Uh. And one
of the people they hired as a civilian scientist consultant
was a man named very important figure in this whole story,

(22:00):
j Allen Heinek from the Ohio State University. You did that, huh?
And he is a prominent astronomer. Does that make you
mad a little bit? I'm not sure why either, but
it does. Uh. He was a prominent astronomer and he
was recruited specifically to be chief of debunker And that's

(22:23):
how we saw his role for sure too, especially initially,
so he was a UFO skeptic UM to him, he
really kind of fell in line with that mentality that
everything could be explained as a hoax or a misunderstanding
or a misidentification. UM. But he was also a scientist
in his you know core. Yeah, he was a very

(22:45):
well respected astronomer, and he believed that this should still
be investigated, especially cases where somebody who was like a
trained pilot or an astronomer or a meteorologist or somebody
had seen something um and and reported it and that

(23:05):
it seemed incredible. Those incredible sightings by incredible people that
was kind of the confounding thread that wound through these
decades of investigation of UFOs. Yeah, and the other thing
too that you gotta remember about Heineck was he was
very much the face of this debunking and uh, it's
a role that he would grow to loathe over the years,

(23:27):
to say the least, because we'll get to some of
the more ridiculous explanations. He was the one that had
to pare it the stuff out. Yeah, you know, they'd
shove him out there, would be like, I don't know,
and then all of a sudden realized there were cameras
in his face and he'd say, yo, everyone. That's what
he was famous for, was that his intro linue. That's
how it started every press conference. So one of his

(23:50):
first efforts here and this was um and maybe his
most famous this was the case of Captain Thomas Mantel.
He was an Air Force pilot who died when his
P fifty one Mustang went down while he was chasing
a UFO. That sounds like an Air Force pilot and
a pet Mustang. That's what you would do. Let me
go after that thing. Sure, I want to, I want

(24:11):
to see what it's like, that's what Maverick would do. Yeah,
I guess. So are you excited about that movie? I know? No, No,
did you see the trailer? No, I'm gonna show it
to you. It has Tom Cruise d aged in it.
They should have just gone with that, So you are
you excited about it? Listen? Man? I like top Gun.

(24:31):
I was not some like. I didn't think I was
some big nut for top Gun. But when I saw
that trailer, it gave me a little bit of the
fields for sure. Yeah, man, I was like, why am
I so excited about this? Wow? Okay, well maybe I'll
give it. I guess on the child of the eighties.
But when I saw him on that that Ninja motorcycle
or whatever, riding around with his helmet on that music,
who is top Gun? Now? Well? I think the deal

(24:54):
is now he comes back, and now there's a brash
young kid. Right, Who's the bresh young kid? Is a
Christian Navarro? I don't think so. I predicted it would be,
and I don't think I'm right. Well, he would have
been better than whoever they got, is what I'm saying,
because he's a friend of the show and the other
guy is probably not of course, although if it turns
out he is, then it would be an even match.
That's right. That's why we cast our a lot behind

(25:17):
people who listen to they're the only respectable people, all right.
At any rate, I will go see this. I will
to my dying day not see the remake of Red Dawn,
despite at least a friend of the show, if not
a former friend of the show, UM producing that film.
Oh luke, Yes, yeah, he says it stinks to I'm

(25:38):
not sure you're allowed to say that. You might want
to email him first, Okay, okay, so okay, Heineck the
P fifty one goes down and Hi Hiinich says, you
know what, he may have been pursuing and chasing Venus
and they you know, that's a planet. Yeah so maybe

(26:00):
uh and it was daytime and you can't see Venus
in the daytime. He's like, yeah, I'm just gonna stick
with Venus. I'm gonna stick with Venus. Goodbye. And there
were That was just one explanation. There were other ones. Obviously.
The weather bloom thing has always been a big one.
UM conventional aircraft that you just you know, you saw
it in the wrong light. Maybe, Yeah, So so you know,

(26:22):
like you watched X files and everything. Sure, Okay, do
you remember how like this kind of like agitated Molder
would get and he'd start talking really fast. He would
just be talking about all the ridiculous explanations that I've
been given for UFOs. This is where they actually started, yeah,
with j Allen Heineck giving these public explanations that over

(26:42):
the years is we'll see really stretch credibility, reason, logic,
common sense and became a just kind of a a
pr problem for the Air Force. Yeah, because it might
have been nothing or something explainable, but to just brush
it under the rug as X or Y, like hey

(27:03):
it's venus. It's like it that makes them do nothing
but look bad, like they're not even taking it seriously,
right right exactly. And I think in the Air Forces
defense or from the position they were coming from, they
didn't think the American public could handle and you know,
oh sure just by saying like, oh, I don't know

(27:25):
what it was. You know, it wasn't a UFO, everybody,
it wasn't an alien, it wasn't the Russians, but we
just we can't say what it was. They were not
prepared to just go out there and do that. Yeah,
and again in their defense, I think America may have
proven them right. They would have just been like, I
knew it, it's aliens, and yeah, well they didn't want that.
So they didn't want that kind of hysteria getting whipped up,

(27:47):
which is why they explained everything, no matter how ridiculous
it was. That's right. So, um, this happened, more and
more and more, more sightings would come in. Air force
would trot Heinek out there again with his hello, good
bye and in between a bunch of bs. Basically, yeah,
everything from balloons, planets, meteor's optical illusions, solar reflections, large

(28:10):
hailstones is one that really got everybody. Um. But as
as far as the air forces like going out there
and just explaining everything in the actual project, people are
saying like, there's some there's some out there that we
just don't understand. There's something some core of this phenomenon. Yes,
a lot of it is probably mass ysteria. Yes, a

(28:32):
lot of his misidentification. But there are again credible witnesses
who are giving these reports and we just can't quite
explain these. Yeah, there was one in particular in September
of ninety one that really kind of brought things to
a head. This was in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and
these were I mean, there were pilots, there were radar operators. Um,

(28:53):
they observed fast moving, highly maneuverable disc shaped aircraft. And
this is something you're gonna see again and again and again. Uh.
They're they're always super fast and can do things that
they've never seen aircraft do, like start and stop like
on a dime, and turn and do these weird things

(29:15):
that like are inexplicable for like really experienced pilots witnessing
this stuff, or traveler even just an It's like this
is there's not anything that at this time was supposed
to be able to do that, right, And so Project Grudge,
the personnel there had to investigate all the stuff and
the chain of command basically was to report it to
Major or Well. The man in charge was Major General

(29:39):
Charles Cabell. He was ahead of Air Force Intelligence at
the Pentagon. Yeah, and because this was these were military witnesses,
it was a military incident, he wanted this directly to him,
that's right. So there was one a Grudge investigator, Lieutenant
Jerry Cummings, not Jerry sitting next to us. She's never

(29:59):
been in the air for hush, as far as I
know what she's been telling me otherwise for years. Oh yeah,
she's a big time impostor if she hasn't been in
the Air Force. So he actually believed that they were
quote intelligently controlled what they investigated. He thought, he's basically

(30:20):
using code for aliens man, right, like the guy from
Ancient Alien exactly. So here's the thing that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings,
who who headed up this project for grudge, he was um,
he was a little He was on the side of
people who were like, no, this is being just swept
under the rug. It's not being seriously investigated. And he

(30:41):
actually griped about it to the head of Air Force Intelligence,
Um Cable, that guy Cable, right, like Cabal Cable, Cabell, Cabell, Okay,
and Cabell was like, what you guys aren't actually investigating
this stuff. This is all just a pr campaign and
uh he was told affirmative, sir, affirmative, and he went
a little nuts. Oh that's what happened. Okay. It wasn't

(31:04):
quite clear on what made it. I didn't write it
very well. Okay, So he said, Okay, this is ridiculous
that we're not actually investigating it. That's going to change.
So he had enough cloud that he got Grudge dissolved. Oh,
I thought he didn't like Grudge. He didn't like the
way that Grudge was conducting this investigation, which is to say,

(31:24):
not at all this makes more sense. And he instead said,
we need to do something else. We need to revamp
this whole project. We're gonna create We're gonna dissolve Grudge,
create a new project. We're gonna call it Project blue
Book because at the time, college exams were given in
these standardized blue test books. And he said that we
need to approach this with all the seriousness of a

(31:44):
test in college. We're gonna call this Project blue Book.
And um, we're going to get a new guy to
head it up, a guy named Captain Edward J. Ruppelt,
And he could not have found a better guy to
to head Project blue Book. All right, let's take another break,
and we should also announce this is a two parter.
I don't think we said that at the onset. Well,

(32:04):
that was gonna be the big cliffhanger, Oh, was it? Yeah,
it was gonna be like the bicycle repair episode of
different Strokes where no one collaps. Everybody just sits there
in stunned silent. Well we can still do that, okay, alright, alright.

(32:43):
So Project blue Book in the special two part episode.
This is the second half of part one. Oh my god,
you has confused me so bad. This was the new
jam after Project Grudge. And you mentioned Edward Captain Edward J.
Repel or is it repelled? I've been calling them ruppled.
Oh really, yeah, your sounds a little more regal. So

(33:05):
let's go with repelled. Okay. Oh man, do people get
sick of this? I can't believe they don't, but they
don't seem to. Our numbers are steady, if not still growing.
I imagine that we lose point five percent of listeners
of a pronunciation alone. Oh, probably more than that. We're
lovable and almost any other way. So blue Book is happening,

(33:27):
and under the command of Repelled. It is the Salad
Days of official Military UFO investigation. I'm glad you use
salad days. Have you ever seen the moning Python Salad Days?
Sketch cheese? I don't know wherever they're playing like tennis
in the late Victorian era, and like all of a sudden,

(33:48):
it just turns into this bizarre blood bath. People like
lose arms and sounds, head falls off. There's just blood everywhere.
I just watch it again, Okay, okay, anytime I hear
salad days, that's what I think. Money Python, They're so great.
So the objective, the objective, cheez. The objectives of Blue

(34:09):
Book were one, determine whether UFOs are a threat to
US security, because that's the big deal. That's why the
military's involved. It's not just like, you know, we just
gotta like calm people's nerves. Like like we said earlier,
they really had to do this because they can't if
Independence Day happened. They can't be the ones who are like, oh,
we we quit investigating this stuff because we thought it

(34:30):
was just movies and science fiction. Yeah, yeah, that's there.
They don't want to investigate this, but they have to
a security concern just in case, and at the very least,
the Air Force has to be showing the country that
they're investigating, that they're on top of any security concerns
like that. That's right. So that was the first objective.
Number two was and this makes sense as well, um

(34:51):
to determine if they possess they meaning the Aliens. I
guess any unique scientific information or advanced technology we could use. Yeah,
and it didn't necessarily have to be Aliens. It could
have been the Soviets too. I think that was probably
the largest suspicion among people who said, no, this is real.
Not necessarily that it's aliens. But maybe the Soviets are

(35:12):
way way further ahead than than we think they are. Yeah,
like maybe they have some advanced by plane in US.
You know, I don't want to spoil anything, but we
had good reason to believe that might be going on, right,
I know what you mean. I hope no one else
does so. Uh, you can thank Mr Repelled or Captain
Repelled by creating the term UFO. Yeah, he was like

(35:35):
flying saucer, flying disc. Those are and and um disc
geese who said, who even came up with that? Um?
Those are totally Unscientifically, we need something that just kind
of resets things and says this is a scientific investigation,
and it worked. I mean, if you it's easy to
thank UFO. Now sounds so like goofy and unscientific, but

(35:56):
when you break down the words, it's it's the classification
that really worked at the time. It's just kind of
go on, it's gone on to feel like something else
and meaning, oh yeah, it's definitely got a lot of
cultural baggage around it now, but at the time, yeah,
it was adia object exactly. And one of the other
benefits of creating this new term was that they are

(36:17):
also allowed to kind of redefine it, and they defined
it really broadly as any aerial object which the observer
is unable to identify, which is I mean, that's a
really broad definition. And it also puts the onus for
figuring out what that object was on the investigator. It's
like basically saying, somebody saw something, they don't know what

(36:39):
it is. Here's the description, go figure it out. Yeah.
And to his credit, he was like, let's get a
database on a computer. And everyone said, what's a computer.
He said, it's right here inside this warehouse, right, the
warehouses the computer that's right, plug it in. Uh. And
he he was gonna apply statistical methods to really try

(37:00):
and figure something out. Drew up these questionnaires for people.
Write a streamline questionnaire. Yeah, stuff like a draw picture
that will show the shape of the object. Um, what
was the condition of the sky. Did it suddenly speed up,
a rush away? Did it change shape? Did it flicker?
Did it throb? Did it pulse? Sate? Never moment? This

(37:22):
is creepy And they shoved the question in air back
across the table. But the UM and that the US
Air Force Space basically designated a special officer to collect
all these reports. Every base had one, every single base,
and they all had to send those two right Patterson,

(37:42):
right exactly. So UM they were taking this like really
scientific approach that was saying like, we don't know what
this is, but we're going to apply science to it,
and we're going to get to the bottom of it.
And as a result, they said, okay, because this definition
for unidentified flying object is so wide, because it's up
to us to investigate, we're gonna come up with three

(38:03):
categories that these can possibly be placed into. There is
identified where we figured it out. It was a meteor,
it was a weather balloon. The person was drunk on
corn whiskey, who knows. Um, there is insufficient data, were like,
I don't know, it's just this thing that flew by.
He'd say, okay, that's an insufficient data one. And then

(38:25):
the last one the most famous one is unidentified, where
no matter what UM they try during this investigation, they
have enough data, they have a good enough description, but
they can't correlate it with any known object phenomenon technology.
And as a result, because of this open mindedness led

(38:47):
by Captain Repelt, that there was a UM unidentified rate
in Project Blue Books Investigation UM during his tenure. That's right, reports,
we're misidentification of known things. Nine, we're insufficient information. I

(39:10):
guess insufficient data and then known category uh one and
a half percent were crackpots, were probable hoaxes, but basically miscellaneous.
And then I think two. Yeah, I'm sorry, unknown, unknown
or unidentified. And to this day, the official number of

(39:35):
unidentified flying objects sightings that remained unidentified unexplained is seven
and one. That's a magic number. Yeah, there are dudes
out there with that tattooed on the back of their neck.
Probably I want to believe. Is that the end of
part one? I think, so Chuck is pretty good spot. Yeah, so,
as is tradition with two parters, We're not gonna do

(39:57):
a listener mail, but we'll do a call out out
for help with you guys, like we do every now
and then so it really helps us out if you
guys leave ratings and reviews on iTunes or the podcatcher
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get a lot out of it, and that stuff really
is what made the show popular to begin with. Yeah,

(40:20):
and we appreciate the continued support. Yeah, we try not
to ask much. A couple of times a year. Maybe, yeah,
please we have another review? Yes, okay, Well, if you
want to get in touch of this in the meantime
while you wait around for part two, you can go
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(40:46):
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