Air Force proposals to improve UFO work (1961)

Air Force proposals to improve UFO work (1961)

Type	Event (internal Air Force response to Congress)
Period	June 1960 – March 1961
Agency	Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Prompted by	Robert Smart, House Armed Services Committee staff; Stuart French, Senate Preparedness Subcommittee staff
Key briefings	13 and 15 July 1960
Proposals	One extra officer; about $1,000 a year more for J. Allen Hynek; $3,000 a year travel; a Polaroid camera and Geiger counter
Outcome	All adopted except the extra officer (memo of 17 March 1961)
Archive	Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), Sweden
Date	17 March 1961
Topics	Government programs (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	J. Allen Hynek
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 64
Year	1961 in UFO history
Timeline	1961 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

The Air Force proposals to improve UFO work appear in Air Force intelligence papers from 1960–61, held in the archive of the Swedish group Archives for the Unexplained (AFU). They show how the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) responded when congressional staff asked it to strengthen its UFO investigations. The proposals were modest. They included one extra officer, more of the astronomer J. Allen Hynek's time, travel money, and a Polaroid camera and Geiger counter. All but the extra officer were eventually adopted.^[1]

Background

By 1960 the Air Force had been responsible for investigating UFO reports for about 13 years. Air Force Regulation 200-2 gave ATIC overall responsibility for the programme, and the Secretary of the Air Force's information office handled public relations. An ATIC staff paper noted that private UFO groups in the United States claimed more than 500,000 members. It said their main claim was that UFOs were interplanetary vehicles and that the Air Force was withholding information. The paper described the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), led by the retired Marine Major Donald Keyhoe, as the most active and influential. It noted that NICAP's board included former Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter. The paper said Keyhoe's attempts to discredit the Air Force's handling of the programme had led to congressional briefings. The first briefing was in the summer of 1958, the year a House subcommittee on atmospheric phenomena also held closed hearings on UFOs.^[1][3]

On 7 June 1960 Major Lawrence Tacker of the Air Force information office warned ATIC's Blue Book chief, Major Robert Friend, of "a very strong possibility" of congressional hearings on UFOs. The concern was a lack of adequate investigation. The case that probably prompted it had been brought to a Virginia congressman but never reported to ATIC by Langley Air Force Base, which considered the witness a chronic reporter. Days later Tacker was asked to brief Congressman Hiestand, who was to be interviewed by Harold Salkin, a writer gathering material for a McCall's article.^[1]

The congressional briefings

In the week of 11–15 July 1960 the Air Force held a series of briefings. On 13 July Stuart French of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee staff argued that ATIC should be able to investigate cases with high intelligence or scientific potential and those attracting unusual public interest. French and Robert Smart of the House Armed Services Committee staff asked for summaries of four cases: Lubbock, Texas (25 August 1951); Washington, D.C. (July 1952); Levelland, Texas (November 1957); and Redmond, Oregon (24 September 1959). On 15 July a joint briefing was held in Secretary Sharp's conference room for the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, the House Science and Astronautics Committee, the House Armed Services Committee and the CIA, with Hynek and Friend present. The Air Force's director of information reported that the committees wanted reassurance because constituents were pressing for public hearings. The consensus afterwards was "that no public hearings will be held in the near future".^[1]

At the 15 July briefing Smart said the Air Force's investigative capability, as then provided, was limited to routine work. He said the Air Force should have enough people and funds to investigate in depth cases of special significance, and that ATIC itself should investigate them. He asked to be kept informed of progress and to receive summaries of all significant cases. ATIC estimated that 12 to 15 cases a year would need its own investigation, at about $200 each, or roughly $3,000 a year. A wave of sightings around Red Bluff, California, on 12–20 August 1960 was handled routinely. In November 1960 Smart, querying those sightings, asked what progress had been made, and was told the changes had not yet been made.^[1]

ATIC's resources

A staff paper prepared after a meeting on 8 December 1960 described the programme's resources. ATIC's Aerial Phenomena Group consisted of one officer and one non-commissioned officer. ATIC could also draw on other agencies' facilities, including NASA, the FBI and the Bureau of Standards. It could use special sources such as missile firing schedules, satellite data, balloon release schedules, special flight information and weather data. Hynek, head of the astronomy department at Northwestern University and director of its Dearborn Observatory, served as scientific consultant at a cost of $3,000 a year.^[1][2]

The proposals

To meet Smart's wishes, the paper said, ATIC would need four things. It would need one more officer for the Aerial Phenomena Group, an increase in Hynek's services at an estimated extra $1,000 a year, and $3,000 a year in extra travel funds. It would also need a Polaroid camera and a Geiger counter for field investigations. It said the proposed increase in scope could be achieved "only by the increase of resources as stated". An internal note added that the extra officer should be a rated officer with a technical background. One officer warned that the result might be "yes, we agree, and then direct the space be withdrawn from some other ATIC area".^[1]

The outcome

A cover memo dated 17 March 1961, signed by Colonel Philip G. Evans, ATIC's deputy for science and components, said all the recommendations had been carried out except the extra officer. Instead, ATIC had made a group of four officers with backgrounds in physics, chemistry and electronics available on a priority on-call basis. It argued that the UFO workload was cyclic and erratic, so a group could handle it more quickly than one officer. A message to headquarters explained that commitments to current intelligence had prevented adding staff. Funds for investigating outstanding cases were being programmed for fiscal 1962, but no increase in personnel was expected. Evans asked that Smart be told of the action taken. One commentator has questioned whether these meagre improvements were really the best the Air Force could do in response to the congressional inquiry.^[1][7]

Context

NICAP kept pressing Congress for hearings. In 1961, after a Newsweek article, the House Science and Astronautics Committee showed interest, and its technical assistant Richard P. Hines visited the Foreign Technology Division in August 1961. By December the proposed hearings were off. Congressman Joseph Karth, who was to chair them, reportedly told the press he would not take part in what he called Keyhoe's "cheap scheme" to discredit the Air Force. James McDonald later recalled that Karth withdrew after Keyhoe announced the hearings prematurely. The only public hearing came in April 1966 before the House Armed Services Committee, after Hynek's "swamp gas" explanation of Michigan sightings angered Gerald Ford. Hynek, once the Air Force's consultant, later became a strong critic of its handling of UFO reports.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

People and topics

• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• J. Allen Hynek — Astronomer and Air Force UFO consultant from 1948 to 1969 who later founded the Center for UFO Studies.
• NICAP — The leading U.S. civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.

On the Timeline

• John McCormack's doubts about the Air Force (1961) (16 February 1961) — House leader John McCormack says the Air Force isn't sharing all it knows about UFOs.
• Kennedy MJ-12 memo of June 1961 (28 June 1961) — An alleged Kennedy memo asks the CIA to review 'MJ-12' operations.

See every 1961 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “J. Allen Hynek”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.