October 17, 2019 • 44 mins
A rash of UFO sightings kicks off a new spike in America’s UFO fever and new headaches for the Air Force, which continues to reluctantly investigate. After becoming a laughingstock for its limp explanations, the Air Force looks for an exit from the UFO biz.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
over there, and this is Park du Um. Project blue
Book that's right where we left off. Project blue Book
(00:25):
has officially been launched. They're doing a pretty good job
of investigating stuff at this point. The Salad Days Salad
Days of official investigation. You know, every time I hear
salad Days, I think of Monty Python sketch about it's
just called salad Days. Great, you should look at I'll
check it out. Is there is there blood? I need
blood in my Monty Py A lot of blood. Okay,
(00:46):
I'm in then, So let's talk about this was a
big if you want to talk to salad days of
UFO sightings. Speaking of salad days, this is one of
the big years. Uh. There were fifty hundred and one
UFO sightings in nineteen fifty two, which there were a
hundred and sixty nine. So there's a lot. Yeah, almost
(01:10):
an increase of ten times, that's right, pretty order of magnitude,
that's right. Yeah, So that's a pretty big uptick. I
guess you could say, and it just so happens that
the Air Force had positioned itself already to investigate this
stuff with an open mind. Yeah, And there were some
big ones, like there was one where the Air Force
(01:31):
scrambled jets to intercept what they called brilliant objects over Washington. Uh,
they were on radar and seen visually in the sky.
And Major General John Sandford, he was the Director of Intelligence,
actually brief the FBI on this one and said, it
is not entirely impossible that the object sided may possibly
be ships from another planet such as Mars. You shouldn't
(01:54):
added that last, really really suck the wind out of
his credibility, Yeah, because he had to go in with
a pretty good sentence there, and he could have just
said from a somewhere else in the galaxy, right, He
might as well have said Uranus. He might as well
said martians. M So Sandford also, I got the impression
(02:15):
he went a little bit rogue here. He held a
press conference, from what I understand of his own accord, Yeah,
to reassure the general public that the Air Force was
on the case and that yes, it's true, we can't
really explain all this stuff but we're looking into it.
But he included the word however, which is very important
because what followed that was, however, a certain percentage had
(02:39):
been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It
is this group of observations that we now are attempting
to resolve. But there is no conceivable threat to the
United States. I don't know if I would have felt
better hearing that presser, I wouldn't have. Yeah, I would
have been like, I knew it. I knew at the
(03:00):
was about to end ye Martians. Who knows who's going
to replace Tom Cruise in top gun. There's this utter
chaos and disorder, that's right. Um. So there was an
article much the same way that the Saturday Evening Post
helped put it kind of a damper on the UFO craze.
The behest of the Air Force back in the forties.
The UFO fever that spiked in nineteen fifty two was
(03:22):
helped along by a Life magazine article, but not from
the Air Force behest. No, No, it was like the opposite.
It was called have we visitors from outer Space? It's
just such a nineteen fifties headline, you know. Yeah, And
they offered or they said they were offering scientific evidence
that there's a real case for in a planetary saucers.
(03:42):
And then I think about ten sightings that they kind
of just went over in great detail. Right, it was
a very long article. It was, um, it really made
the case that yes, there was probably extraterrestrials visiting US.
I bet that was a big issue of life. Sure,
but they sold a lot of those, Yeah, and they
I mean it landed really well and really hard among
the American public because they were in the grips of
(04:04):
UFO fever again. So while this is going on like it,
it had kind of died down a little bit as
crazy and in fact, the I think the Air Force
was kind of surprised when it flared up again because
it had a little bit died down from seven to
say nifty, and then all of a sudden fifty two.
I don't know where it comes back. It's like a
(04:25):
hemorrhoid you thought you'd taken care of exactly. That's an
exact analogy. It's perfect. So the c I A, um,
they had been kind of keeping tabs on this stuff.
I wondered about this when I was reading this, I
was like where are they this whole time? That's exactly
what they wanted you to wonder and then conclude they're
not doing anything exactly Could that be on the news? Right? Right?
(04:47):
So it turns out that the CIA was doing something
even though it wasn't on the news. Um. There was
a guy named H. H. Marshall Chadwell, where did all
these people come from? Yel or something's great there? Everyone
involved in this this UFO investigation came from Yale. BA
sound like blue bloods. So um. He was the assistant
director of Scientific Intelligence for the CIA, and he basically said, hey, um,
(05:12):
we don't know what these are. By the way, I
don't know if you've been paying attention to this stuff,
but we should probably investigate it. That's right. So he Um.
He got a panel impaneled, there's really no other way
to put it. I like that word. Um in ninety
two and it was led by a physicist, a very famous,
likable physicist named Howard Percy Robertson. He was likable physicists, sure,
(05:37):
he was very very well liked in his class at Yale.
He would be H. Percy Robertson at Yale though, Oh
I guess so he really would he loosened the club
tie by going by Howard Percy. Yeah, so he was
from cal Tech and he looked into this thing and
they had this panel and they met for for days
(06:00):
twelve hours a few hours a day. That seems a
little skimpy to me, but whatever, same here, I've only
got three hours a day to do. They just basically
went around the room taking turns reading that Life magazine
article out loud, I guess so, and then discussing what
they thought about it. So Repelled is still here. He's
the head of Blue Book at the time. Still Heinik
was there. He's still around. Yeah, he's never he's never left, right, No,
(06:24):
he's part of this this ongoing project that's right investigation. Uh.
And then other people that were involved that you know
should have been in the room and were in the room,
and they were all presenting what they thought were the
most interesting cases to what would be eventually known as
the Robertson Panel. Right, the Robertson Panel said thank you
very much, all of you will will be in touch.
(06:44):
Don't call us, We'll call you. And they issued a
final report and it said that of all UFO cases
could be explained by meteorological, meteorological, astronomical, celestial, known scientific stuff.
Sure technology, that that's believable. Okay, the other ten percent, though,
(07:05):
if we spend enough time and energy investigating it, we
could also explain those. Yeah, that's where the b S
comes in. Their conclusion was that given enough time and effort,
of all UFO sightings could be explained underknown scientific or
technological explanation. And no one said, so are you saying
(07:26):
that ten percent of these are so confounding that you
can't explain them? And they went, yeah, but we could,
we just don't have enough time. Exactly. It's a really
passive aggressive way of saying there is no such thing
as alien. Yeah, pretty much so that but that is
ultimately what they said. Yeah, but here's the thing though,
they did see that this was the fact that people
(07:48):
were sighting these UFOs, and it was all over the papers. Um,
the craze was a bad thing and and dangerous, even
because the Cold War is heating up like we were
talking about. Um, the Soviets have been known to secretly
exploit the American psyche. Um, that never happens anymore. Of course,
(08:09):
they don't do anything like that. Well, it's like you said,
this was the Cold War, that's right. They were known
to do this kind of thing, and they thought, this
is a perfect opportunity for the Soviets to come in
fake reports about UFOs, get everyone distracted, worked up into
a frenzy, um and they start asking them questions about
pulsating and and they said, and not only that, but
(08:34):
the Soviets, Uh, I read their papers or I have
them read to me, and uh, they don't have any
reportings of UFO sidings. So they're clearly if there are any,
they're keeping a lid on it. And this is our
problem that they can exploit. We can't do the same
back to them, right, So all the Soviets had to
do would be come in and be like UFOs UFOs
basically like shouting, you know, fire and a crowded theater,
(08:56):
which is the legal of course, as everyone knows. That's right. Um, so, uh,
this is a this is a problem. This is like
with the way the CIA thought, you know, this is
something that they need to do something about. So they
decided to um basically undo that that Cold War hysteria
and panic. Yeah, but they were in a pickle though,
(09:17):
because they like they're supposed to be tamping down this
thing that they don't if that they I feel like
they shouldn't even be investigating to begin with. Right, they're
denying that something even exists, but continuing to investigate it. Right.
So what I was saying is they decided to say, Okay,
we need to get rid of this Cold War hysteria,
(09:39):
we need to kind of take the air out of
this weird phenomenon in American culture. And they decided to
do that by exploiting America with a public relations campaign
very as you say, bern Asian. Uh. And they said, hey,
call up Walt Disney. Yeah, and they really did. They thought,
you know, um, we're gonna get this out in the media.
(10:00):
We're gonna have um, we're gonna create this propaganda that's
gonna sweep the nation on TV and in movies and
in newspapers debunking all this stuff, showing like, hey, this
is how you explain this stuff, right, saying like here's
this report and here's the scientific explanation for it, and
that they consider that would be very powerful. And I
(10:21):
think they're right. Yeah, just basically priming America's pump to
where if you're having a water cooler conversation and bring
something up about a UFO. There are five people there
to say, didn't you see that thing like that? It's
weather balloons. People love doing that and if you can
arm people with that, they will do it every time.
And that that actually is a pretty good plan for
(10:42):
tamping down. It's a great plan. They also decided, maybe
one of the less great parts of the plan, to
surveil and keep tabs on UFO groups for anti American
stuff because this was during the McCarthy era. Of course. Yeah,
so everybody was doing anti America and stuff if they
weren't painting their white picket fence. Yeah, and I was.
(11:03):
You know, I mentioned Disney and we both laugh, But
that was not a joke. They actually did think about
um and who knows, maybe they got in touch with
Disney about making some propaganda pieces to help them out
because they had done that before. Chip and Dale originally
started out as UFOO investigators. But it's just kind of
one thing led to another. Uh. They worked on propaganda
(11:24):
pieces before that was one called Donald gets drafted, uh
Donald Duck propaganda film UM And they said it never
came to fruition, but it would not surprise me if
they didn't poke around a little bit, right, like in
Earnest Donald gets drafted. Did Yeah that was a one
that got released. Oh you mean like the UFO one. Yeah, Like,
it wouldn't surprise me if they really did have an
(11:45):
official meeting and Disney just said no, like we're not
going to get involved. They're like, but we have this
idea about psychic children. But I guess it's kind of
pro psychic. Really, I wonder what the messages an Escape
from which Mountain. I haven't seen it in so long.
I'm sure there's some very clear message that as an adult,
you'd be like, this is what I was taught. Yeah,
(12:05):
I mean I saw both of those. Didn't the rock
recreate that remake it? I think so? But I did
not recreate. Makes it sound like he just did it
in his head in his living room or something here.
He recreated that after dinner one night. I really think
he was in that a remake. No, I think you're right.
I never I never bothered. Oh I didn't. I like
that guy though. Oh The Rocky is great. I mean
(12:27):
I don't go see his movies much, but he seems
like a good dude, right, he does seem like a
good dude. You have a sense for these kind of things.
There was one TV show, There was a CBS show
called UFOs colon Friend, Foe or Fantasy? And is this
the one that Cronkite Okay, I didn't know if that
(12:49):
was a separate one. Did I write this that poorly?
It's part of the same sentence? No, I know, I
just I couldn't tell if it was me it was
my because it says isn't the same sentence narrated by
Walter Cronkite? Yes, okay, No, you are heated, grace, thank
you for rest. This is the nineteen sixty six uh.
(13:09):
And this was um largely over the Michigan sightings. Yeah,
we'll talk about those in a little bit. Yeah, just
stick a pin in that. But it was big enough
that they brought concrete or cron Kite out concrete, you
know how I'm talking about, Sure Walter concrete. That's he's
a legend. You turn them upside down and shake him
and we'll come out of the cup. So but in
(13:30):
that in that documentary is very much a pro skeptic
anti UFO documentary where it's they followed this um the
Robertson Panel recommendations of saying, here's this amazing report of
the sighting. Here's how it's explained. Here's another study. Here's
how it's explained. Don't you see now that UFOs are
actually really just kind of something. They're they're not alien.
(13:53):
It's fantasy. They called it friend forward fantasy. They should
have just called it UFOs fantasy, right, because that was
the upshot of it all. So UM, that Robertson panel report,
there's something else that was really interesting about it. UM
had a very surprising knock on effect years later. So
this the panel was was impaneled in ninety two, i
(14:15):
think the year of that, that UFO fever outbreak, and
it's um it's proceedings and its recommendations stayed classified until
nineteen seventy five, and after a blue book was gone. Yeah,
years after it was gone. So I'm sure they figured like, oh,
it's fine, whatever, just release it. But here's the thing.
Up to that point, up to nineteen seventy five, as
(14:36):
far as anyone in the American public was concerned, the
CIA had just remained quiet on the whole thing. It
was all you. US Air Force CEA had nothing to
do with it, And so all of a sudden, this
Robertson panel comes out, and it's not only their own report,
but they also mentioned an earlier CIA panel that had
basically the same conclusions um that showed that very much
(14:59):
the I was involved in this and that they covered
it up and two people in nine it gave the
the alien conspiracy theory a real shot in the arm
because it showed no, the CIA was definitely investigating this
and they covered it up. So how can we trust
anything that anybody says about this? Yeah, covering, covering it
(15:20):
up to begin with just made the cover up. It
was a cover up. It made a it made something
that wasn't a cover up a cover up. Yeah, exactly,
by covering and fueled all sorts of conspiracy theories. That's
how it works. That's just how it works. The US government,
probably any government, will never ever learn, but that is
(15:40):
just how it works. That's right. There was another report
declassified in nine, uh, where the CIA set around the
mid nineteen fifties, they started observing planes that could flat
high altitudes, they started creating them. Yeah, well it said observing,
So I guess they were just observing what they create.
Come on. You can't take everything I say, literally. Uh,
(16:04):
and we're talking about remember earlier I kind of teased
about the fact that the Soviets might have these spy
planes because we had spy planes, the U two spy
plane very much top secret at the time. Yeah, it's
it's like the old adage when you point in the
sky at the Rusha's spy plane, you've got three fingers
pointing back at your spy plane. Right. Uh. It was
(16:26):
very much top secret, like I said, and it was.
It could go up to sixty thousand feet, which is
three to five times higher than any commercial plane could
fly at the time. And they were commercial pilots are
seeing these things and reporting on them. Well, yeah, because
they were silver at first, they weren't painted the cooler
black color until later on. I guess with the touring
(16:47):
models that they started to pump out there and they
you know, were very reflective, so at sunrise and at sunset,
these things would cast these weird lights and uh, you know,
commercial pilots, because they didn't know this was a thing,
would say, hey, there's something going on a way up
above me, or people would see them from the ground. Yeah,
flying really fast, really high, and looking like fire. Yeah,
(17:09):
because this started I think testerones in the mid nineteen fifties,
so that coincides with a lot of these sightings. Yeah.
So this this c I a memo for that was
declassified in basically said, by our estimate of that seven
one unidentified UM report of the reports that were remain unidentified,
(17:32):
Project bluebooks files, UM are you two and SR seventy
one test flights can probably account for about half of those, right,
which whittles that number down dramatically. Should we take another break?
All right, We'll take a break and come back and
talk about the return of Heineck right after this, Chuck,
(18:16):
this is going so well. Thanks, I'm really impressed. Good
so Heinich, He said he returned, but really he never
went anywhere. He's still plodding along doing his thing. He
started out at Project sign. By this time it's blue book.
It's like us with this place. How many times has
it changed hands? A million? We're still here. We're like
(18:39):
the Heinecks here of how stuff works. So um with
with the years, however, Heinek himself seems to have changed,
and he changed probably earlier than he made it public
that he had changed. But he later said, you know what, everybody,
I actually think that these UFOs are a thing at
(18:59):
the very least some stuff we can't explain, and we
should be investigating them way more scientifically than we are.
And that really flew in the face of the public
face that he had, which by the by the time
he he came out and said that had become something
of a laughing stock at the behest of the Air Force. Yeah,
like what the change was is Repelled left in nineteen
(19:20):
fifty three and he was the dude that kind of
had it running like a legit investigatory body. He left,
and then Heineck says it basically just became a pr
device um and the stats prove it out. It was
the unexplained case rate of up to that we talked
about after Repelled left that went down to one, which
(19:42):
is just an insult. Even if you're a skeptic, that's
an insult, right, because again they would use anything that
they could think of, including planets that weren't even visible
in the sky at the time. There was very famously
one UM where I think there was a sighting in Oklahoma,
I believe, Yeah, yeah, there was a the Oklahoma State
(20:08):
Police Tinker Air Force Base and a meteorologist in Oklahoma
who was using weather radar at the time, all independently
tracked four objects, one of them on radar, and Heinek
in the Air Force of who were doing UM Project
blue Book representing Project Blue Books, said it was Jupiter. Yeah,
(20:30):
which is not a good explanation for four objects that
are both visually cited and show up on radar, because
Jupiter doesn't show up on radar, and it certainly doesn't
show up as four fast moving objects. Yes, and Jupiter
wasn't even visible in the night sky on that date, right,
So this definitely kind of like is a really good
example of what what Heinech was having to come out
(20:50):
and say to the public, you know, towards the end
of his UM his Camel's backbreaking. Yeah. And here's the
thing is, he was still slightly skept I mean, I
don't know about slightly skeptical. He was still a skeptic,
I guess. But his whole beef was uh. And he says,
this is a direct quote, he said, everything was negative
(21:12):
and unyielding in their attitude. Everything had to have an explanation.
And I began to resent that even though I basically
felt the same way. I thought they weren't going about
it in the right way. So that was the deal
is the Air Force was just sort of an obligatory
stamp of not true. It was this, and he was like, well,
I don't necessarily think it's a alien saucer either, but like,
(21:34):
can we investigate it and get like a real explanation
at least? Yeah, that was definitely his thing. And then
the other thing was that one through line that has
kept skeptics interested in this is credible observers reporting incredible,
unexplainable things. That's right. So those two things, the Air
Force jurking him in the way that they were carrying
out the investigation, and these credible observers actually caused him
(21:57):
to undergo a conversion. There's a debate, oh, for whether
it was a slow conversion or a quick conversion. Some
people suspect that he was actually a lifelong believer and
that he just kind of kept it under wraps. But
even after you underwent this conversion, which has been estimated
to have happened around nineteen sixty, he kept it. He
kept quiet, as a matter of fact, for years, and
(22:18):
he didn't want to stake his personal reputation, his professional career,
all that stuff on just coming out and being like, hey, everybody,
the Air Force is lying to you, especially considering that
the general public by this time had had completely bought
into the idea that the Air Force was just blatantly
and clumsily trying to cover up knowledge of UFOs and
(22:40):
their reality. Yeah, he said he was kind of waiting
for the big one, right, like something so irrefutable that
he could actually really go public with it. All right, Well,
let's talk about the swamp gas in Michigan. This is
in March nineteen sixty six, very famous case. Uh, there
was a sighting over several days or hundreds of people
that reported glowing objects hovering and flying around an arbor Michigan,
(23:05):
and then a bunch of towns along the countryside between
Toledo and Detroit. Same thing. Eight seven students at Hillsdale
College in Michigan, and they all said the same stuff
as that we've seen these objects with red, white and
blue lights. Um one family instead of UFO landed on
their farm. I don't know about that one, sure, but
(23:25):
you never know. Yeah, the college students might stretch credibility
a little bit, but it was a big national story.
Heinek went there and it was basically a frenzy, so
much so that he had trouble getting interviews with the
witnesses as the official like representative, because the press was
all over it. Right, Yeah, the press were eating up
(23:46):
all of their time. He couldn't he couldn't interview them,
but he finally did, and he held a press conference,
and um at the press conference, he said, it's possible
some some of the sightings may have mistaken swamp gas
for UFOs. And in this guy's defense, he had he
said some. He didn't say all. He wasn't dismissive about it.
(24:09):
It was just something he said, but the press took
it and and it converted it into all. Basically, the
headlines read Heineck dismissed his sightings as swamp gas and
that that was that. Like he had basically said, it
was all swamp gas. Everybody knew that scores and dozens
and possibly hundreds of people across Ohio and Michigan hadn't
(24:30):
all seen swamp gas, and that was a preposterous explanation,
especially if you laid it on the whole thing. Yeah,
Johnny Carson even had an astronomer on to basically refute
the swamp gas theory. There. Yeah, there's a headline air
Force insults public with swamp gas theory. That wasn't like
a legitimate newspaper. So it was a ridiculous thing that
(24:55):
got It was a dumb thing to say, but I
think he said it not not realizing that it was
going to become the explanation and it was going to
make him a further laughing stock. It just so happened
that that swamp gas thing was the last straw that
that broke Heine's back. Yeah, it broke his back. And
there was a senator out of Michigan named Gerald Ford,
(25:18):
and he said, I want to I demand a congressional hearing.
And they said who are you? He said, I'm Senator
Gerald Ford. I'm gonna be president one day. Yeah, you'll see.
I'll fix you good when i'm president. They said, how
are you gonna be president? Your senator? He said, well,
it's complicated, you'll see, right. Uh So he demands this
hearing and they, uh they held a hearing the following month,
(25:39):
and this is when Heinek really got a chance to
to kind of publicly out himself as a convert and
said my recommendation, Senator Ford, watch your step is UFO
sighting should be investigated by scientists and not the military.
And this was music to the ears of the military
in a lot of ways. Yeah, they said, he said
(26:01):
it finally. Yeah, great, They said, yes, you're absolutely right,
we should have somebody scientifically investigate this. And the Air Force,
for its part, saw an out of being in this
UFO investigating business that it didn't want to be in
the first place, that that in some way Heinek had
just opened the door for them. So they said, yeah,
(26:22):
we agree with Heinek. You guys should totally get some
sort of scientific study going. And I don't know if
it was Congress that hired them or if the Air
Force did, but either way, a committee led by a
physicist named Edward Condon, University of Colorado, UM Buffalo. They yeah,
they took up the I they took up the task
(26:45):
of figuring out whether um UFOs actually were a thing
or not in deserve scientific study. Right. So this is
a three year study in the end, and the objective
was to really take it seriously as an academic and
they did that, right. No, they didn't it was really
just a smoke screen um to get the Air Force
(27:07):
out of this business once and for all, because Condon basically,
and there was a bit of a drumbeat in the
public of like your wastinger taxpayer money. There were some
people that shot this was super worthwhile, but most people
saw it as like, why is the Air Force wasting
their time with this stuff? I would guess that would
have been William F. Buckley's position probably, so so, Yeah,
there were some people, especially people in the Air Force tour,
(27:29):
like this is this is a dumb thing to do,
where this is a dumb waste of time. So Condon said, Okay,
I am possibly the only person on the planet who's
in a position to get the Air Force out of
UFO investigations. I'll do a little wink wink, nudge nudge,
ask a few people if it pulsated or throbbed, and
then we'll just release a report that says no. And
(27:52):
that's exactly what they did. In January of nineteen sixty nine,
they released the Condom Report, which was respectably four and
thirty nine pages long. Yeah, but this quote from Condon
though in sixty seven, uh, it is my inclination right
now to recommend that the government get out of this business.
My attitude right now is there's nothing to it. But
I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year,
(28:13):
So that that really it really undermines that really frankly
whittles it down to about fifty just with that one quote.
You know, so, Um, the kind of report basically says, hey, everybody, Um,
our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the
study of UFOs in the past twenty one years that
has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record
(28:36):
as it is available to us leads us to conclude
that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified
in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. And
the weird thing is, Chuck is I agree with him wholeheartedly. Yeah,
we didn't learn anything except about ourselves from investigating UFOs
(28:57):
all these years that we know about. Okay, I'll give
you that, except for toasters, and um, did that come
from the UFO tech. That's something what some people say, Yeah, yeah,
there's like if you're a UFO believer, Um, one of
the big things people point to is this boom in
technology that came after World War Two. We're on about
(29:18):
the time the ros Ball crash happened, and they point
to right Patterson and say, well, we learned a lot
from this, and we started making microwaves and tang and
all sorts of stuff ended up on the moon. Um,
those aliens were touched in their bread, and right, we
gotta get in on this. I like the real version
of it where that guy had a chocolate bar, Percy,
I can't remember his last name. He had a chocolate
(29:38):
bar in his in his pocket and melted when he
got too close to a microwave. He's like, let's start
making popcorn with this thing. Man, I forgot about that
guy Percy something. We're gonna call him Percy Sledge. Okay,
I was just about to say that. I was so uh.
I'll tell you what. Let's take a break here and
we'll tell you about what happened with Project blue Book
right after this. Alright, Project blue Book closed was killing
(30:28):
December seventeenth nine. It was officially closed the Airport sonatifact
sheet and said, no UFO has ever been a threat
to our national security. UM, they don't recognize any technological developments. Um,
there are no extraterrestrial vehicles. UM. And if you're a ufologist,
(30:48):
is that what it's called, you followed upologists? Then um,
you think it's just all one big lie. Still, yeah,
there's there's another documented sighting. Here's the thing with all
these documented sightings, it's like, yes, people did say this. Yeah,
So it's it's really tough to kind of like as
(31:09):
coming from like the stuff you should know way to
be like, well to contradict this official report. Here's this other,
you know, thing that we should be skeptical of. But
there is there was something that happened at UM a
Malmstrom Air Force based in Montana in ninety seven where
allegedly ten of our nuclear warheads were suddenly taken offline
(31:35):
while this unidentified object was hovering overhead, and that the
people who were tasked with UM watching the warheads all
reported on this and it was documented supposedly, and that
the Air Forces fact sheet thus that this was never
a threat to our national security was a flat lie. Yeah.
(31:56):
So in the end, they Project Bluebook and all of
the other projects came before it investigated over twelve thousand sightings,
UM seven hundred and one remained unidentified. If you go
by that number if you listen to the military, like
you said, half of those were you two's or blackbirds,
which is like what three fifty or so? But even
(32:17):
still okay, So there's three d and fifty that's a lot, okay,
But other people say, no, it's even more than that,
right exactly because these were official investigations and you didn't
even investigate the one that I saw, buddy. A lot
of that stuff goes on. That's one. Um. Yeah, and
that's actually evidenced in the number of sightings that increased
after Project Blue Books. So um, in nineteen sixty five,
(32:42):
I believe there was eight hundred and eighty six reported
sightings as part of Project Blue Book. In two thousand
and fourteen, there were eighty six hundred nineteen. In two
thou eighteen there were thirty two d and thirty six.
That was a slow year. So a lot of people
say the Air Force wasn't actually investigating all these Yeah,
and granted this is you should know, this comes from
(33:03):
private UH groups and citizens who have developed these groups
for reporting, like the National UFO Reporting Center, because it's
not codified now by the military, so citizens have done this.
So take it. Take that number with a grain of salt.
But at the same time, it's not necessarily that these
(33:24):
groups are drumming up sightings. There may even be more
because at the time, in the forties, fifties, and sixties,
the American public generally knew if you saw something, you
would contact your local Air Force base. I wonder how
many people know who to contact if they think they
see something, have no idea. I don't either. I would
just drive up to Dobbins and like knock on the
(33:45):
front gate. They'd be like, come inside, forever um. One
of the other things. One of the other reasons that
people say now the unidentified number is actually way higher
than seven hundred is because if you take those cases
where you say it was Jupiter, it was a weather balloon,
it was some stupid thing we just came up with.
Those cases go from identified to actually unidentified, and so
(34:08):
that number increases even further. Project Blue Book Will Never
Die Friend, No, well not and something else won't ever
die is Heinik is the person who who developed the
very famous Close Encounters rating scale. Uh. If you've seen
the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, highly recommended.
(34:28):
First of all, great Great Steven Spielberg film with the
great great Richard Dreyfuss, Terry gar for God's sakes, but
using that man, she's so good. I miss her. So
the first kind is and you get one point. It's
a rating scale for the believability of a sighting. Yeah,
(34:50):
I just love the point thing, right, I got two points.
So you get one point if you uh see a
UFO within five feet not bad. Set kind is two points.
Of course, that is a physical effect um happens, which
is like in Close Encounters when he's on the railroad tracks,
(35:10):
his headlights start going bersark and his truck shakes, and
the crossing gate on the on the railroad track goes
up and down. That would be I wonder if there'd
be two points for each of those things. Are two
points for the experience? I don't know, because I mean
you're just running those numbers, two for each point. It
blinked again, It blinked again, right. And then finally the
third kind, the old three point line, that is when
(35:33):
you see an alien or interact with an alien, and
obviously in the film, that is when Richard Dreyfuss at
the end walks up into that spaceship and takes the
hand the aliens and probably like the most unbelivable. It's
a pretty old movie. And then it's called the Third Kind. Sure,
so the most unbelievable part of this whole thing is
(35:55):
that Heinik went from the guy who was saying it
was a weather balloon, it was this train pilot saw
Jupiter even though Jupiter wasn't even the sky right then
to the guy who literally wrote the book that founded uphology,
it was the UFO experience calling a scientific inquiry. Yeah,
he just completely basically switched sides and said, there's a
(36:17):
lot of stuff that we can't explain. Here's all these
you know, all this experience that I have investigating these things.
Let's go forward and figure this out. I don't want
to be a cynic, but I wonder what salary he
had as a private citizen for years and years doing
this being the face of this. Do you think he
(36:38):
was like, that's pretty good money. Maybe, And then when
the time was up, he said, you know what writes
some books? Maybe, um As from what I can tell,
he's a respected person in the field and in a
lot of fields. Actually I didn't get anything because whenever,
you know, when we research something, if somebody's like that
somebody's out there sniping them. I don't remember this really
(37:01):
coming up. The only thing I saw that was that
was somebody throwing shade. Was the idea that he had
been a believer all along, right, and then it was
actually faking as a skeptic. But he was a pretty
pretty believable fake skeptic. That's right. And here's the deal
though things did not stop. UM. That was a classified
memo that's not classified any longer from October nine, just
(37:26):
before blue Book was terminated, that basically revealed that like, hey,
we're gonna still investigate stuff. It's not part of blue
Book anymore, but here's how we're gonna do it and
what we're gonna do, like, here's the process, and that astounding. Yeah,
I mean not really, but I mean there was a
memo that was sent out after blue Book, right before
blue Book was shut down, saying, don't worry, we're still
(37:46):
going to have procedure for reporting this stuff and investigating it.
It's just not going to be public, right, and uh,
Harry Reid sent a majority leader at the time, UM,
he had his program. It was all over the news,
UM where what was it called the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program because I guess Harry Reid thought there's something
(38:08):
out there and we need to look. It was a
pet project of his. That's right. You know, both Carter
and Reagan claimed to have seen UFOs. I think I
did know that a new Carter. Of course Carter. I
didn't know about Reagan. I don't think really. Oh yeah,
we talked about that. I think we did, uh live
(38:29):
at at Comic Con, didn't we do Ufoh this was better?
I agree? I think I agree. This feels more like real. Yeah. Well,
if there's anything unreal, it's being at actually south By
Southwest that wasn't Yes, okay, no comment. But this stuff
(38:50):
still goes on. Even though that project from Harry Reid
was shut down supposedly or shut down in twelve people
involved say, no, we're still doing it. We're still doing
that stuff. And here's the thing. When that came out,
this is two thousand seventeen. The guy who ran that
that program um came out and told everybody about it.
The New York Times reported on it, used all this
(39:10):
breathless stuff like really jumped to conclusions with the facts,
and then other people started reporting on that and exactly
the kind of reporting that was going on in the
forties and the fifties and the sixties and the seventies
about UFOs just continued again in two thousand seventeen. And
this is just probably how it's always going to be. Yeah.
(39:30):
And one of the big things was this two thousand
four sighting in San Diego from to I think Navy pilots.
And then they released the footage just a couple of
years ago in two thousand seventeen, as part of this
New York Times article. Yeah, they released the video footage
and you can go watch it on YouTube. I was
released in December of Uh. It is just I mean,
(39:52):
you can see this flying saucer, and you can hear
these pilots, these trained navy pilots. What the heck? Yeah,
they're like, look at it. Bro um. He actually said
bro uh did he? I must party calls him bro.
They described it as a forty ft long tic tac uh,
and then afterward, in subsequent interviews, one of them said
(40:13):
it it accelerated like nothing I've ever seen before. And
I have no idea what I saw that day, saw
the newest by plane from the future. Who knows, Well,
that's it for Project Bluebook. Everybody, I'm sure we um
less some stuff out. If we did, let us know,
especially if you're U followedists. We want to hear from you.
(40:35):
Um And since I said we want to hear from you,
that means, of course it's time for a listener mail.
This is just a little shout out about a couple
of references that that Brad and Sacramento likes. Thanks for
everything over the years, guys. I had to write in
too acknowledge Chuck's Striper reference in the Nuclear Semiotics episode.
It had me laughing. It took me back. I discovered
(40:57):
Striper in the late nineties, which is pretty late for
Striper really, and they were kind of a joke in
my circle of friends, most of them who had grown
up involved in the church. To Hell with the Devil
has been my favorite. Was it the name of their album?
I think so, or maybe it was just a song.
It's another an album called The Yellow and Black Attack.
(41:18):
I had these in my record collections. I don't anymore,
you lie, I wish I did. I'm surprised you haven't
gone back. Might it would be a fun party joke
to see how long it up on? I would love
to hear about Chuck's experience seeing them live. Well, I'll
go ahead and tell you I was into it when
(41:41):
I saw them live, like black and Yellow, spandex Sure. Yeah,
the drummer played. He was set up sideways. I remember
that was interesting, Like he was turned perpendicular to the
stage to the crowd. Yeah, like the drum set was
facing the side of the stage. Well, I guess because
he would sing and the microphone was to his left
facing the audience. But I don't It still doesn't make sense,
(42:03):
So I don't know why they did it. There's a
million ways you can put that microphone that's easier than
turning the whole drum kid, I totally that guy liked
his abs is what it was, and he wanted you
to like. I don't know if I'm not mistaken. The
drummer was the brother of the singer. Uh, Michael, Sweet,
I'm pulling this all out of behind in your so, Josh.
(42:24):
My favorite reference of yours was a while ago. I
don't remember all the details, but I had something to
do with a scene from Harry and the Henderson's when
Lithgow was trying to get Harry to go back into
the wild do you remember what you said? Yeah, I
was just describing how he like punches them in the face.
He says, yeah, but I don't remember what that was
in reference to it wasn't that long ago. I do.
(42:45):
I do remember that. Remember, you guys have a way
of making personal connection with your listeners, and I can
really appreciate that. Thanks for keeping things PG because I
love to listen with my kids and that is Brad
and Sacramento. Yeah. Man, it's kind of the point now
where I feel your cursing. I had to get used
to it on movie Crush cursing, and then it's now
(43:05):
it's his second nature. Has it become weird on stuff?
You should know to not curse an adult? I can.
There's a dividing line. Oh b camera, huh, yep. Nice.
I'm just a big dumb animal. No, no, no, It
takes a It takes a lot of verve and grit
and to be able to curse here and not curse there.
(43:28):
I've always been really good at it because of nieces
and nephews and just I was always hyper aware and
still am about being in public and like people being
around that I might offend. I don't. I don't want
to be that guy. Yeah. Well, if you want to
congratulate Chuck on this amazing sentiment of his, you should
follow us on social media. You can go to stuff
you Should Know dot com and check out all of
(43:50):
our social links there, or you can send your congratulations
directly to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. H
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, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
over there, and this is Park du Um. Project blue
Book that's right where we left off. Project blue Book
(00:25):
has officially been launched. They're doing a pretty good job
of investigating stuff at this point. The Salad Days Salad
Days of official investigation. You know, every time I hear
salad Days, I think of Monty Python sketch about it's
just called salad Days. Great, you should look at I'll
check it out. Is there is there blood? I need
blood in my Monty Py A lot of blood. Okay,
(00:46):
I'm in then, So let's talk about this was a
big if you want to talk to salad days of
UFO sightings. Speaking of salad days, this is one of
the big years. Uh. There were fifty hundred and one
UFO sightings in nineteen fifty two, which there were a
hundred and sixty nine. So there's a lot. Yeah, almost
(01:10):
an increase of ten times, that's right, pretty order of magnitude,
that's right. Yeah, So that's a pretty big uptick. I
guess you could say, and it just so happens that
the Air Force had positioned itself already to investigate this
stuff with an open mind. Yeah, And there were some
big ones, like there was one where the Air Force
(01:31):
scrambled jets to intercept what they called brilliant objects over Washington. Uh,
they were on radar and seen visually in the sky.
And Major General John Sandford, he was the Director of Intelligence,
actually brief the FBI on this one and said, it
is not entirely impossible that the object sided may possibly
be ships from another planet such as Mars. You shouldn't
(01:54):
added that last, really really suck the wind out of
his credibility, Yeah, because he had to go in with
a pretty good sentence there, and he could have just
said from a somewhere else in the galaxy, right, He
might as well have said Uranus. He might as well
said martians. M So Sandford also, I got the impression
(02:15):
he went a little bit rogue here. He held a
press conference, from what I understand of his own accord, Yeah,
to reassure the general public that the Air Force was
on the case and that yes, it's true, we can't
really explain all this stuff but we're looking into it.
But he included the word however, which is very important
because what followed that was, however, a certain percentage had
(02:39):
been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It
is this group of observations that we now are attempting
to resolve. But there is no conceivable threat to the
United States. I don't know if I would have felt
better hearing that presser, I wouldn't have. Yeah, I would
have been like, I knew it. I knew at the
(03:00):
was about to end ye Martians. Who knows who's going
to replace Tom Cruise in top gun. There's this utter
chaos and disorder, that's right. Um. So there was an
article much the same way that the Saturday Evening Post
helped put it kind of a damper on the UFO craze.
The behest of the Air Force back in the forties.
The UFO fever that spiked in nineteen fifty two was
(03:22):
helped along by a Life magazine article, but not from
the Air Force behest. No, No, it was like the opposite.
It was called have we visitors from outer Space? It's
just such a nineteen fifties headline, you know. Yeah, And
they offered or they said they were offering scientific evidence
that there's a real case for in a planetary saucers.
(03:42):
And then I think about ten sightings that they kind
of just went over in great detail. Right, it was
a very long article. It was, um, it really made
the case that yes, there was probably extraterrestrials visiting US.
I bet that was a big issue of life. Sure,
but they sold a lot of those, Yeah, and they
I mean it landed really well and really hard among
the American public because they were in the grips of
(04:04):
UFO fever again. So while this is going on like it,
it had kind of died down a little bit as
crazy and in fact, the I think the Air Force
was kind of surprised when it flared up again because
it had a little bit died down from seven to
say nifty, and then all of a sudden fifty two.
I don't know where it comes back. It's like a
(04:25):
hemorrhoid you thought you'd taken care of exactly. That's an
exact analogy. It's perfect. So the c I A, um,
they had been kind of keeping tabs on this stuff.
I wondered about this when I was reading this, I
was like where are they this whole time? That's exactly
what they wanted you to wonder and then conclude they're
not doing anything exactly Could that be on the news? Right? Right?
(04:47):
So it turns out that the CIA was doing something
even though it wasn't on the news. Um. There was
a guy named H. H. Marshall Chadwell, where did all
these people come from? Yel or something's great there? Everyone
involved in this this UFO investigation came from Yale. BA
sound like blue bloods. So um. He was the assistant
director of Scientific Intelligence for the CIA, and he basically said, hey, um,
(05:12):
we don't know what these are. By the way, I
don't know if you've been paying attention to this stuff,
but we should probably investigate it. That's right. So he Um.
He got a panel impaneled, there's really no other way
to put it. I like that word. Um in ninety
two and it was led by a physicist, a very famous,
likable physicist named Howard Percy Robertson. He was likable physicists, sure,
(05:37):
he was very very well liked in his class at Yale.
He would be H. Percy Robertson at Yale though, Oh
I guess so he really would he loosened the club
tie by going by Howard Percy. Yeah, so he was
from cal Tech and he looked into this thing and
they had this panel and they met for for days
(06:00):
twelve hours a few hours a day. That seems a
little skimpy to me, but whatever, same here, I've only
got three hours a day to do. They just basically
went around the room taking turns reading that Life magazine
article out loud, I guess so, and then discussing what
they thought about it. So Repelled is still here. He's
the head of Blue Book at the time. Still Heinik
was there. He's still around. Yeah, he's never he's never left, right, No,
(06:24):
he's part of this this ongoing project that's right investigation. Uh.
And then other people that were involved that you know
should have been in the room and were in the room,
and they were all presenting what they thought were the
most interesting cases to what would be eventually known as
the Robertson Panel. Right, the Robertson Panel said thank you
very much, all of you will will be in touch.
(06:44):
Don't call us, We'll call you. And they issued a
final report and it said that of all UFO cases
could be explained by meteorological, meteorological, astronomical, celestial, known scientific stuff.
Sure technology, that that's believable. Okay, the other ten percent, though,
(07:05):
if we spend enough time and energy investigating it, we
could also explain those. Yeah, that's where the b S
comes in. Their conclusion was that given enough time and effort,
of all UFO sightings could be explained underknown scientific or
technological explanation. And no one said, so are you saying
(07:26):
that ten percent of these are so confounding that you
can't explain them? And they went, yeah, but we could,
we just don't have enough time. Exactly. It's a really
passive aggressive way of saying there is no such thing
as alien. Yeah, pretty much so that but that is
ultimately what they said. Yeah, but here's the thing though,
they did see that this was the fact that people
(07:48):
were sighting these UFOs, and it was all over the papers. Um,
the craze was a bad thing and and dangerous, even
because the Cold War is heating up like we were
talking about. Um, the Soviets have been known to secretly
exploit the American psyche. Um, that never happens anymore. Of course,
(08:09):
they don't do anything like that. Well, it's like you said,
this was the Cold War, that's right. They were known
to do this kind of thing, and they thought, this
is a perfect opportunity for the Soviets to come in
fake reports about UFOs, get everyone distracted, worked up into
a frenzy, um and they start asking them questions about
pulsating and and they said, and not only that, but
(08:34):
the Soviets, Uh, I read their papers or I have
them read to me, and uh, they don't have any
reportings of UFO sidings. So they're clearly if there are any,
they're keeping a lid on it. And this is our
problem that they can exploit. We can't do the same
back to them, right, So all the Soviets had to
do would be come in and be like UFOs UFOs
basically like shouting, you know, fire and a crowded theater,
(08:56):
which is the legal of course, as everyone knows. That's right. Um, so, uh,
this is a this is a problem. This is like
with the way the CIA thought, you know, this is
something that they need to do something about. So they
decided to um basically undo that that Cold War hysteria
and panic. Yeah, but they were in a pickle though,
(09:17):
because they like they're supposed to be tamping down this
thing that they don't if that they I feel like
they shouldn't even be investigating to begin with. Right, they're
denying that something even exists, but continuing to investigate it. Right.
So what I was saying is they decided to say, Okay,
we need to get rid of this Cold War hysteria,
(09:39):
we need to kind of take the air out of
this weird phenomenon in American culture. And they decided to
do that by exploiting America with a public relations campaign
very as you say, bern Asian. Uh. And they said, hey,
call up Walt Disney. Yeah, and they really did. They thought,
you know, um, we're gonna get this out in the media.
(10:00):
We're gonna have um, we're gonna create this propaganda that's
gonna sweep the nation on TV and in movies and
in newspapers debunking all this stuff, showing like, hey, this
is how you explain this stuff, right, saying like here's
this report and here's the scientific explanation for it, and
that they consider that would be very powerful. And I
(10:21):
think they're right. Yeah, just basically priming America's pump to
where if you're having a water cooler conversation and bring
something up about a UFO. There are five people there
to say, didn't you see that thing like that? It's
weather balloons. People love doing that and if you can
arm people with that, they will do it every time.
And that that actually is a pretty good plan for
(10:42):
tamping down. It's a great plan. They also decided, maybe
one of the less great parts of the plan, to
surveil and keep tabs on UFO groups for anti American
stuff because this was during the McCarthy era. Of course. Yeah,
so everybody was doing anti America and stuff if they
weren't painting their white picket fence. Yeah, and I was.
(11:03):
You know, I mentioned Disney and we both laugh, But
that was not a joke. They actually did think about
um and who knows, maybe they got in touch with
Disney about making some propaganda pieces to help them out
because they had done that before. Chip and Dale originally
started out as UFOO investigators. But it's just kind of
one thing led to another. Uh. They worked on propaganda
(11:24):
pieces before that was one called Donald gets drafted, uh
Donald Duck propaganda film UM And they said it never
came to fruition, but it would not surprise me if
they didn't poke around a little bit, right, like in
Earnest Donald gets drafted. Did Yeah that was a one
that got released. Oh you mean like the UFO one. Yeah, Like,
it wouldn't surprise me if they really did have an
(11:45):
official meeting and Disney just said no, like we're not
going to get involved. They're like, but we have this
idea about psychic children. But I guess it's kind of
pro psychic. Really, I wonder what the messages an Escape
from which Mountain. I haven't seen it in so long.
I'm sure there's some very clear message that as an adult,
you'd be like, this is what I was taught. Yeah,
(12:05):
I mean I saw both of those. Didn't the rock
recreate that remake it? I think so? But I did
not recreate. Makes it sound like he just did it
in his head in his living room or something here.
He recreated that after dinner one night. I really think
he was in that a remake. No, I think you're right.
I never I never bothered. Oh I didn't. I like
that guy though. Oh The Rocky is great. I mean
(12:27):
I don't go see his movies much, but he seems
like a good dude, right, he does seem like a
good dude. You have a sense for these kind of things.
There was one TV show, There was a CBS show
called UFOs colon Friend, Foe or Fantasy? And is this
the one that Cronkite Okay, I didn't know if that
(12:49):
was a separate one. Did I write this that poorly?
It's part of the same sentence? No, I know, I
just I couldn't tell if it was me it was
my because it says isn't the same sentence narrated by
Walter Cronkite? Yes, okay, No, you are heated, grace, thank
you for rest. This is the nineteen sixty six uh.
(13:09):
And this was um largely over the Michigan sightings. Yeah,
we'll talk about those in a little bit. Yeah, just
stick a pin in that. But it was big enough
that they brought concrete or cron Kite out concrete, you
know how I'm talking about, Sure Walter concrete. That's he's
a legend. You turn them upside down and shake him
and we'll come out of the cup. So but in
(13:30):
that in that documentary is very much a pro skeptic
anti UFO documentary where it's they followed this um the
Robertson Panel recommendations of saying, here's this amazing report of
the sighting. Here's how it's explained. Here's another study. Here's
how it's explained. Don't you see now that UFOs are
actually really just kind of something. They're they're not alien.
(13:53):
It's fantasy. They called it friend forward fantasy. They should
have just called it UFOs fantasy, right, because that was
the upshot of it all. So UM, that Robertson panel report,
there's something else that was really interesting about it. UM
had a very surprising knock on effect years later. So
this the panel was was impaneled in ninety two, i
(14:15):
think the year of that, that UFO fever outbreak, and
it's um it's proceedings and its recommendations stayed classified until
nineteen seventy five, and after a blue book was gone. Yeah,
years after it was gone. So I'm sure they figured like, oh,
it's fine, whatever, just release it. But here's the thing.
Up to that point, up to nineteen seventy five, as
(14:36):
far as anyone in the American public was concerned, the
CIA had just remained quiet on the whole thing. It
was all you. US Air Force CEA had nothing to
do with it, And so all of a sudden, this
Robertson panel comes out, and it's not only their own report,
but they also mentioned an earlier CIA panel that had
basically the same conclusions um that showed that very much
(14:59):
the I was involved in this and that they covered
it up and two people in nine it gave the
the alien conspiracy theory a real shot in the arm
because it showed no, the CIA was definitely investigating this
and they covered it up. So how can we trust
anything that anybody says about this? Yeah, covering, covering it
(15:20):
up to begin with just made the cover up. It
was a cover up. It made a it made something
that wasn't a cover up a cover up. Yeah, exactly,
by covering and fueled all sorts of conspiracy theories. That's
how it works. That's just how it works. The US government,
probably any government, will never ever learn, but that is
(15:40):
just how it works. That's right. There was another report
declassified in nine, uh, where the CIA set around the
mid nineteen fifties, they started observing planes that could flat
high altitudes, they started creating them. Yeah, well it said observing,
So I guess they were just observing what they create.
Come on. You can't take everything I say, literally. Uh,
(16:04):
and we're talking about remember earlier I kind of teased
about the fact that the Soviets might have these spy
planes because we had spy planes, the U two spy
plane very much top secret at the time. Yeah, it's
it's like the old adage when you point in the
sky at the Rusha's spy plane, you've got three fingers
pointing back at your spy plane. Right. Uh. It was
(16:26):
very much top secret, like I said, and it was.
It could go up to sixty thousand feet, which is
three to five times higher than any commercial plane could
fly at the time. And they were commercial pilots are
seeing these things and reporting on them. Well, yeah, because
they were silver at first, they weren't painted the cooler
black color until later on. I guess with the touring
(16:47):
models that they started to pump out there and they
you know, were very reflective, so at sunrise and at sunset,
these things would cast these weird lights and uh, you know,
commercial pilots, because they didn't know this was a thing,
would say, hey, there's something going on a way up
above me, or people would see them from the ground. Yeah,
flying really fast, really high, and looking like fire. Yeah,
(17:09):
because this started I think testerones in the mid nineteen fifties,
so that coincides with a lot of these sightings. Yeah.
So this this c I a memo for that was
declassified in basically said, by our estimate of that seven
one unidentified UM report of the reports that were remain unidentified,
(17:32):
Project bluebooks files, UM are you two and SR seventy
one test flights can probably account for about half of those, right,
which whittles that number down dramatically. Should we take another break?
All right, We'll take a break and come back and
talk about the return of Heineck right after this, Chuck,
(18:16):
this is going so well. Thanks, I'm really impressed. Good
so Heinich, He said he returned, but really he never
went anywhere. He's still plodding along doing his thing. He
started out at Project sign. By this time it's blue book.
It's like us with this place. How many times has
it changed hands? A million? We're still here. We're like
(18:39):
the Heinecks here of how stuff works. So um with
with the years, however, Heinek himself seems to have changed,
and he changed probably earlier than he made it public
that he had changed. But he later said, you know what, everybody,
I actually think that these UFOs are a thing at
(18:59):
the very least some stuff we can't explain, and we
should be investigating them way more scientifically than we are.
And that really flew in the face of the public
face that he had, which by the by the time
he he came out and said that had become something
of a laughing stock at the behest of the Air Force. Yeah,
like what the change was is Repelled left in nineteen
(19:20):
fifty three and he was the dude that kind of
had it running like a legit investigatory body. He left,
and then Heineck says it basically just became a pr
device um and the stats prove it out. It was
the unexplained case rate of up to that we talked
about after Repelled left that went down to one, which
(19:42):
is just an insult. Even if you're a skeptic, that's
an insult, right, because again they would use anything that
they could think of, including planets that weren't even visible
in the sky at the time. There was very famously
one UM where I think there was a sighting in Oklahoma,
I believe, Yeah, yeah, there was a the Oklahoma State
(20:08):
Police Tinker Air Force Base and a meteorologist in Oklahoma
who was using weather radar at the time, all independently
tracked four objects, one of them on radar, and Heinek
in the Air Force of who were doing UM Project
blue Book representing Project Blue Books, said it was Jupiter. Yeah,
(20:30):
which is not a good explanation for four objects that
are both visually cited and show up on radar, because
Jupiter doesn't show up on radar, and it certainly doesn't
show up as four fast moving objects. Yes, and Jupiter
wasn't even visible in the night sky on that date, right,
So this definitely kind of like is a really good
example of what what Heinech was having to come out
(20:50):
and say to the public, you know, towards the end
of his UM his Camel's backbreaking. Yeah. And here's the
thing is, he was still slightly skept I mean, I
don't know about slightly skeptical. He was still a skeptic,
I guess. But his whole beef was uh. And he says,
this is a direct quote, he said, everything was negative
(21:12):
and unyielding in their attitude. Everything had to have an explanation.
And I began to resent that even though I basically
felt the same way. I thought they weren't going about
it in the right way. So that was the deal
is the Air Force was just sort of an obligatory
stamp of not true. It was this, and he was like, well,
I don't necessarily think it's a alien saucer either, but like,
(21:34):
can we investigate it and get like a real explanation
at least? Yeah, that was definitely his thing. And then
the other thing was that one through line that has
kept skeptics interested in this is credible observers reporting incredible,
unexplainable things. That's right. So those two things, the Air
Force jurking him in the way that they were carrying
out the investigation, and these credible observers actually caused him
(21:57):
to undergo a conversion. There's a debate, oh, for whether
it was a slow conversion or a quick conversion. Some
people suspect that he was actually a lifelong believer and
that he just kind of kept it under wraps. But
even after you underwent this conversion, which has been estimated
to have happened around nineteen sixty, he kept it. He
kept quiet, as a matter of fact, for years, and
(22:18):
he didn't want to stake his personal reputation, his professional career,
all that stuff on just coming out and being like, hey, everybody,
the Air Force is lying to you, especially considering that
the general public by this time had had completely bought
into the idea that the Air Force was just blatantly
and clumsily trying to cover up knowledge of UFOs and
(22:40):
their reality. Yeah, he said he was kind of waiting
for the big one, right, like something so irrefutable that
he could actually really go public with it. All right, Well,
let's talk about the swamp gas in Michigan. This is
in March nineteen sixty six, very famous case. Uh, there
was a sighting over several days or hundreds of people
that reported glowing objects hovering and flying around an arbor Michigan,
(23:05):
and then a bunch of towns along the countryside between
Toledo and Detroit. Same thing. Eight seven students at Hillsdale
College in Michigan, and they all said the same stuff
as that we've seen these objects with red, white and
blue lights. Um one family instead of UFO landed on
their farm. I don't know about that one, sure, but
(23:25):
you never know. Yeah, the college students might stretch credibility
a little bit, but it was a big national story.
Heinek went there and it was basically a frenzy, so
much so that he had trouble getting interviews with the
witnesses as the official like representative, because the press was
all over it. Right, Yeah, the press were eating up
(23:46):
all of their time. He couldn't he couldn't interview them,
but he finally did, and he held a press conference,
and um at the press conference, he said, it's possible
some some of the sightings may have mistaken swamp gas
for UFOs. And in this guy's defense, he had he
said some. He didn't say all. He wasn't dismissive about it.
(24:09):
It was just something he said, but the press took
it and and it converted it into all. Basically, the
headlines read Heineck dismissed his sightings as swamp gas and
that that was that. Like he had basically said, it
was all swamp gas. Everybody knew that scores and dozens
and possibly hundreds of people across Ohio and Michigan hadn't
(24:30):
all seen swamp gas, and that was a preposterous explanation,
especially if you laid it on the whole thing. Yeah,
Johnny Carson even had an astronomer on to basically refute
the swamp gas theory. There. Yeah, there's a headline air
Force insults public with swamp gas theory. That wasn't like
a legitimate newspaper. So it was a ridiculous thing that
(24:55):
got It was a dumb thing to say, but I
think he said it not not realizing that it was
going to become the explanation and it was going to
make him a further laughing stock. It just so happened
that that swamp gas thing was the last straw that
that broke Heine's back. Yeah, it broke his back. And
there was a senator out of Michigan named Gerald Ford,
(25:18):
and he said, I want to I demand a congressional hearing.
And they said who are you? He said, I'm Senator
Gerald Ford. I'm gonna be president one day. Yeah, you'll see.
I'll fix you good when i'm president. They said, how
are you gonna be president? Your senator? He said, well,
it's complicated, you'll see, right. Uh So he demands this
hearing and they, uh they held a hearing the following month,
(25:39):
and this is when Heinek really got a chance to
to kind of publicly out himself as a convert and
said my recommendation, Senator Ford, watch your step is UFO
sighting should be investigated by scientists and not the military.
And this was music to the ears of the military
in a lot of ways. Yeah, they said, he said
(26:01):
it finally. Yeah, great, They said, yes, you're absolutely right,
we should have somebody scientifically investigate this. And the Air Force,
for its part, saw an out of being in this
UFO investigating business that it didn't want to be in
the first place, that that in some way Heinek had
just opened the door for them. So they said, yeah,
(26:22):
we agree with Heinek. You guys should totally get some
sort of scientific study going. And I don't know if
it was Congress that hired them or if the Air
Force did, but either way, a committee led by a
physicist named Edward Condon, University of Colorado, UM Buffalo. They yeah,
they took up the I they took up the task
(26:45):
of figuring out whether um UFOs actually were a thing
or not in deserve scientific study. Right. So this is
a three year study in the end, and the objective
was to really take it seriously as an academic and
they did that, right. No, they didn't it was really
just a smoke screen um to get the Air Force
(27:07):
out of this business once and for all, because Condon basically,
and there was a bit of a drumbeat in the
public of like your wastinger taxpayer money. There were some
people that shot this was super worthwhile, but most people
saw it as like, why is the Air Force wasting
their time with this stuff? I would guess that would
have been William F. Buckley's position probably, so so, Yeah,
there were some people, especially people in the Air Force tour,
(27:29):
like this is this is a dumb thing to do,
where this is a dumb waste of time. So Condon said, Okay,
I am possibly the only person on the planet who's
in a position to get the Air Force out of
UFO investigations. I'll do a little wink wink, nudge nudge,
ask a few people if it pulsated or throbbed, and
then we'll just release a report that says no. And
(27:52):
that's exactly what they did. In January of nineteen sixty nine,
they released the Condom Report, which was respectably four and
thirty nine pages long. Yeah, but this quote from Condon
though in sixty seven, uh, it is my inclination right
now to recommend that the government get out of this business.
My attitude right now is there's nothing to it. But
I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year,
(28:13):
So that that really it really undermines that really frankly
whittles it down to about fifty just with that one quote.
You know, so, Um, the kind of report basically says, hey, everybody, Um,
our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the
study of UFOs in the past twenty one years that
has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record
(28:36):
as it is available to us leads us to conclude
that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified
in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. And
the weird thing is, Chuck is I agree with him wholeheartedly. Yeah,
we didn't learn anything except about ourselves from investigating UFOs
(28:57):
all these years that we know about. Okay, I'll give
you that, except for toasters, and um, did that come
from the UFO tech. That's something what some people say, Yeah, yeah,
there's like if you're a UFO believer, Um, one of
the big things people point to is this boom in
technology that came after World War Two. We're on about
(29:18):
the time the ros Ball crash happened, and they point
to right Patterson and say, well, we learned a lot
from this, and we started making microwaves and tang and
all sorts of stuff ended up on the moon. Um,
those aliens were touched in their bread, and right, we
gotta get in on this. I like the real version
of it where that guy had a chocolate bar, Percy,
I can't remember his last name. He had a chocolate
(29:38):
bar in his in his pocket and melted when he
got too close to a microwave. He's like, let's start
making popcorn with this thing. Man, I forgot about that
guy Percy something. We're gonna call him Percy Sledge. Okay,
I was just about to say that. I was so uh.
I'll tell you what. Let's take a break here and
we'll tell you about what happened with Project blue Book
right after this. Alright, Project blue Book closed was killing
(30:28):
December seventeenth nine. It was officially closed the Airport sonatifact
sheet and said, no UFO has ever been a threat
to our national security. UM, they don't recognize any technological developments. Um,
there are no extraterrestrial vehicles. UM. And if you're a ufologist,
(30:48):
is that what it's called, you followed upologists? Then um,
you think it's just all one big lie. Still, yeah,
there's there's another documented sighting. Here's the thing with all
these documented sightings, it's like, yes, people did say this. Yeah,
So it's it's really tough to kind of like as
(31:09):
coming from like the stuff you should know way to
be like, well to contradict this official report. Here's this other,
you know, thing that we should be skeptical of. But
there is there was something that happened at UM a
Malmstrom Air Force based in Montana in ninety seven where
allegedly ten of our nuclear warheads were suddenly taken offline
(31:35):
while this unidentified object was hovering overhead, and that the
people who were tasked with UM watching the warheads all
reported on this and it was documented supposedly, and that
the Air Forces fact sheet thus that this was never
a threat to our national security was a flat lie. Yeah.
(31:56):
So in the end, they Project Bluebook and all of
the other projects came before it investigated over twelve thousand sightings,
UM seven hundred and one remained unidentified. If you go
by that number if you listen to the military, like
you said, half of those were you two's or blackbirds,
which is like what three fifty or so? But even
(32:17):
still okay, So there's three d and fifty that's a lot, okay,
But other people say, no, it's even more than that,
right exactly because these were official investigations and you didn't
even investigate the one that I saw, buddy. A lot
of that stuff goes on. That's one. Um. Yeah, and
that's actually evidenced in the number of sightings that increased
after Project Blue Books. So um, in nineteen sixty five,
(32:42):
I believe there was eight hundred and eighty six reported
sightings as part of Project Blue Book. In two thousand
and fourteen, there were eighty six hundred nineteen. In two
thou eighteen there were thirty two d and thirty six.
That was a slow year. So a lot of people
say the Air Force wasn't actually investigating all these Yeah,
and granted this is you should know, this comes from
(33:03):
private UH groups and citizens who have developed these groups
for reporting, like the National UFO Reporting Center, because it's
not codified now by the military, so citizens have done this.
So take it. Take that number with a grain of salt.
But at the same time, it's not necessarily that these
(33:24):
groups are drumming up sightings. There may even be more
because at the time, in the forties, fifties, and sixties,
the American public generally knew if you saw something, you
would contact your local Air Force base. I wonder how
many people know who to contact if they think they
see something, have no idea. I don't either. I would
just drive up to Dobbins and like knock on the
(33:45):
front gate. They'd be like, come inside, forever um. One
of the other things. One of the other reasons that
people say now the unidentified number is actually way higher
than seven hundred is because if you take those cases
where you say it was Jupiter, it was a weather balloon,
it was some stupid thing we just came up with.
Those cases go from identified to actually unidentified, and so
(34:08):
that number increases even further. Project Blue Book Will Never
Die Friend, No, well not and something else won't ever
die is Heinik is the person who who developed the
very famous Close Encounters rating scale. Uh. If you've seen
the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, highly recommended.
(34:28):
First of all, great Great Steven Spielberg film with the
great great Richard Dreyfuss, Terry gar for God's sakes, but
using that man, she's so good. I miss her. So
the first kind is and you get one point. It's
a rating scale for the believability of a sighting. Yeah,
(34:50):
I just love the point thing, right, I got two points.
So you get one point if you uh see a
UFO within five feet not bad. Set kind is two points.
Of course, that is a physical effect um happens, which
is like in Close Encounters when he's on the railroad tracks,
(35:10):
his headlights start going bersark and his truck shakes, and
the crossing gate on the on the railroad track goes
up and down. That would be I wonder if there'd
be two points for each of those things. Are two
points for the experience? I don't know, because I mean
you're just running those numbers, two for each point. It
blinked again, It blinked again, right. And then finally the
third kind, the old three point line, that is when
(35:33):
you see an alien or interact with an alien, and
obviously in the film, that is when Richard Dreyfuss at
the end walks up into that spaceship and takes the
hand the aliens and probably like the most unbelivable. It's
a pretty old movie. And then it's called the Third Kind. Sure,
so the most unbelievable part of this whole thing is
(35:55):
that Heinik went from the guy who was saying it
was a weather balloon, it was this train pilot saw
Jupiter even though Jupiter wasn't even the sky right then
to the guy who literally wrote the book that founded uphology,
it was the UFO experience calling a scientific inquiry. Yeah,
he just completely basically switched sides and said, there's a
(36:17):
lot of stuff that we can't explain. Here's all these
you know, all this experience that I have investigating these things.
Let's go forward and figure this out. I don't want
to be a cynic, but I wonder what salary he
had as a private citizen for years and years doing
this being the face of this. Do you think he
(36:38):
was like, that's pretty good money. Maybe, And then when
the time was up, he said, you know what writes
some books? Maybe, um As from what I can tell,
he's a respected person in the field and in a
lot of fields. Actually I didn't get anything because whenever,
you know, when we research something, if somebody's like that
somebody's out there sniping them. I don't remember this really
(37:01):
coming up. The only thing I saw that was that
was somebody throwing shade. Was the idea that he had
been a believer all along, right, and then it was
actually faking as a skeptic. But he was a pretty
pretty believable fake skeptic. That's right. And here's the deal
though things did not stop. UM. That was a classified
memo that's not classified any longer from October nine, just
(37:26):
before blue Book was terminated, that basically revealed that like, hey,
we're gonna still investigate stuff. It's not part of blue
Book anymore, but here's how we're gonna do it and
what we're gonna do, like, here's the process, and that astounding. Yeah,
I mean not really, but I mean there was a
memo that was sent out after blue Book, right before
blue Book was shut down, saying, don't worry, we're still
(37:46):
going to have procedure for reporting this stuff and investigating it.
It's just not going to be public, right, and uh,
Harry Reid sent a majority leader at the time, UM,
he had his program. It was all over the news,
UM where what was it called the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program because I guess Harry Reid thought there's something
(38:08):
out there and we need to look. It was a
pet project of his. That's right. You know, both Carter
and Reagan claimed to have seen UFOs. I think I
did know that a new Carter. Of course Carter. I
didn't know about Reagan. I don't think really. Oh yeah,
we talked about that. I think we did, uh live
(38:29):
at at Comic Con, didn't we do Ufoh this was better?
I agree? I think I agree. This feels more like real. Yeah. Well,
if there's anything unreal, it's being at actually south By
Southwest that wasn't Yes, okay, no comment. But this stuff
(38:50):
still goes on. Even though that project from Harry Reid
was shut down supposedly or shut down in twelve people
involved say, no, we're still doing it. We're still doing
that stuff. And here's the thing. When that came out,
this is two thousand seventeen. The guy who ran that
that program um came out and told everybody about it.
The New York Times reported on it, used all this
(39:10):
breathless stuff like really jumped to conclusions with the facts,
and then other people started reporting on that and exactly
the kind of reporting that was going on in the
forties and the fifties and the sixties and the seventies
about UFOs just continued again in two thousand seventeen. And
this is just probably how it's always going to be. Yeah.
(39:30):
And one of the big things was this two thousand
four sighting in San Diego from to I think Navy pilots.
And then they released the footage just a couple of
years ago in two thousand seventeen, as part of this
New York Times article. Yeah, they released the video footage
and you can go watch it on YouTube. I was
released in December of Uh. It is just I mean,
(39:52):
you can see this flying saucer, and you can hear
these pilots, these trained navy pilots. What the heck? Yeah,
they're like, look at it. Bro um. He actually said
bro uh did he? I must party calls him bro.
They described it as a forty ft long tic tac uh,
and then afterward, in subsequent interviews, one of them said
(40:13):
it it accelerated like nothing I've ever seen before. And
I have no idea what I saw that day, saw
the newest by plane from the future. Who knows, Well,
that's it for Project Bluebook. Everybody, I'm sure we um
less some stuff out. If we did, let us know,
especially if you're U followedists. We want to hear from you.
(40:35):
Um And since I said we want to hear from you,
that means, of course it's time for a listener mail.
This is just a little shout out about a couple
of references that that Brad and Sacramento likes. Thanks for
everything over the years, guys. I had to write in
too acknowledge Chuck's Striper reference in the Nuclear Semiotics episode.
It had me laughing. It took me back. I discovered
(40:57):
Striper in the late nineties, which is pretty late for
Striper really, and they were kind of a joke in
my circle of friends, most of them who had grown
up involved in the church. To Hell with the Devil
has been my favorite. Was it the name of their album?
I think so, or maybe it was just a song.
It's another an album called The Yellow and Black Attack.
(41:18):
I had these in my record collections. I don't anymore,
you lie, I wish I did. I'm surprised you haven't
gone back. Might it would be a fun party joke
to see how long it up on? I would love
to hear about Chuck's experience seeing them live. Well, I'll
go ahead and tell you I was into it when
(41:41):
I saw them live, like black and Yellow, spandex Sure. Yeah,
the drummer played. He was set up sideways. I remember
that was interesting, Like he was turned perpendicular to the
stage to the crowd. Yeah, like the drum set was
facing the side of the stage. Well, I guess because
he would sing and the microphone was to his left
facing the audience. But I don't It still doesn't make sense,
(42:03):
So I don't know why they did it. There's a
million ways you can put that microphone that's easier than
turning the whole drum kid, I totally that guy liked
his abs is what it was, and he wanted you
to like. I don't know if I'm not mistaken. The
drummer was the brother of the singer. Uh, Michael, Sweet,
I'm pulling this all out of behind in your so, Josh.
(42:24):
My favorite reference of yours was a while ago. I
don't remember all the details, but I had something to
do with a scene from Harry and the Henderson's when
Lithgow was trying to get Harry to go back into
the wild do you remember what you said? Yeah, I
was just describing how he like punches them in the face.
He says, yeah, but I don't remember what that was
in reference to it wasn't that long ago. I do.
(42:45):
I do remember that. Remember, you guys have a way
of making personal connection with your listeners, and I can
really appreciate that. Thanks for keeping things PG because I
love to listen with my kids and that is Brad
and Sacramento. Yeah. Man, it's kind of the point now
where I feel your cursing. I had to get used
to it on movie Crush cursing, and then it's now
(43:05):
it's his second nature. Has it become weird on stuff?
You should know to not curse an adult? I can.
There's a dividing line. Oh b camera, huh, yep. Nice.
I'm just a big dumb animal. No, no, no, It
takes a It takes a lot of verve and grit
and to be able to curse here and not curse there.
(43:28):
I've always been really good at it because of nieces
and nephews and just I was always hyper aware and
still am about being in public and like people being
around that I might offend. I don't. I don't want
to be that guy. Yeah. Well, if you want to
congratulate Chuck on this amazing sentiment of his, you should
follow us on social media. You can go to stuff
you Should Know dot com and check out all of
(43:50):
our social links there, or you can send your congratulations
directly to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
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