National Bureau of Standards 1943 UFO claim

National Bureau of Standards 1943 UFO claim

Source	Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science, vol. 1 (journals 1957–1969), p. 309
Informant	Unnamed former engineer with U.S. intelligence in Germany
Alleged study	National Bureau of Standards UFO investigation "under Professor Dryden", from 1943
Named figure	Hugh L. Dryden (1898–1965)
Status	Second-hand; no records found
Date	1969
Topics	Government programs (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	Jacques Vallée, Hugh Dryden
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 72
Year	1969 in UFO history
Timeline	1969 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

The National Bureau of Standards 1943 UFO claim is a story recorded by the computer scientist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallée in the first volume of his published journals, Forbidden Science, which covers 1957 to 1969. An unnamed former engineer with U.S. intelligence in Germany told Vallée that the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) had investigated UFOs "under Professor Dryden" as early as 1943, alongside a study of German jet-aircraft research. The investigators were said to know already that UFOs could stop internal-combustion engines at a distance, and to suspect electrostatic effects.^[1] "Dryden" was presumably Hugh L. Dryden, the NBS aerodynamicist who later ran the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and became NASA's deputy administrator.^[2] No document supporting the story has been found.^[1]

The claim

• The researcher Keith Basterfield came across the passage while rereading Forbidden Science: Journals 1957–1969 and quoted it in a March 2013 blog post about little-known "secret studies" of UAP. It is on page 309 of the book. In it Vallée wrote that he kept hearing of old secret government projects that were not documented anywhere, and then gave the engineer's account.^[1]
• According to the engineer, the NBS investigation ran together with an investigation of German research on jet aircraft. Its staff already knew that UFOs interfered with internal-combustion engines at a distance, and they suspected electrostatic effects.^[1]
• Vallée's journal gives no name for the engineer and no documents. Basterfield set the claim beside other once-secret studies he had written about, including a McDonnell Douglas study and one involving President Lyndon Johnson, both from the late 1960s.^[1]

Hugh Dryden

• Hugh Latimer Dryden joined the NBS in 1918, earned a Johns Hopkins doctorate in physics and mathematics in 1919 at the age of 20, and in 1920 became head of the bureau's new Aerodynamics Division. He studied airfoils near the speed of sound and boundary-layer flow, work that contributed to the wings of the P-51 Mustang. By 1934 he was chief of the bureau's Mechanics and Sound Division, and in 1939 he became a member of NACA.^[2]
• During the Second World War, Dryden advised the Air Force and led development of the "Bat", a radar-homing guided bomb used in combat in April 1945. He was therefore at the bureau, doing wartime aeronautical work, in the year the story names.^[2]
• After the war he became NACA's director of aeronautical research in 1946 and its director from 1947 to October 1958. He then served as NASA's deputy administrator from August 1958 until his death from cancer on 2 December 1965.^[2] In 1962 he negotiated the Dryden–Blagonravov agreement on U.S.–Soviet space cooperation, and NASA later named its Dryden Flight Research Center after him.^[2]

The 1957 testimony

• Basterfield found Dryden in the index of UFOs and Government, a 2012 history. It records that in 1957 Dryden and Doolittle "flatly denied the existence of such space vehicles" before the House Appropriations Committee.^[1] The UAP timeline in Michael Shellenberger's 2024 House testimony garbles this into Dryden telling the committee that "someone named 'Doolittle'" had told him UAP did not exist.^[7]
• An Associated Press report of 14 March 1957, quoted by the researcher Kevin McClure in The Nazi UFO Mythos, shows what the testimony was actually about. James H. Doolittle, the NACA chairman, and Dryden, its director, were asked about claims in a book by Rudolf Lusar, a former German War Ministry weapons official, that Nazi Germany had built a flying saucer and a bomber able to reach America and return without refuelling. Doolittle said it "just ain't so." Dryden said there was "no truth" in the claim that German engineers had designed a saucer that reached 40,000 ft and 1,250 mph. He called it an advertisement for a book that used material found by "our groups who went into Germany after the war".^[8]
• The earlier version of this article said Dryden and Doolittle told the committee that "flying saucers did not exist". The AP report shows they were rejecting a specific claim about German wartime saucers rather than speaking about UFOs in general.^[8] McClure also quotes a report of 29 March 1957 from the Air Technical Intelligence Center, which found no evidence in its files of German or Soviet development of "flying discs".^[8]
• Dryden's remark that U.S. teams had gone into Germany after the war to examine its aviation research fits the "German research on jet aircraft" part of Vallée's story. It does not, however, mention any UFO study.^[8]

Wartime research

• Looking for other evidence of the project, Basterfield turned to UFOs and Government. Its first chapter describes how the physicist David Griggs looked into "anomalous air-encounter stories" about "foo fighters", the balls of light reported by Allied aircrews during the Second World War (p. 5). It stresses that Griggs knew of cases in which foo fighters were linked to aircraft engine interference (p. 6).^[1]
• The book makes no mention of any interest in the subject by the National Bureau of Standards in 1943.^[1]

Later retellings

• The anonymous UAP timeline included in the journalist Michael Shellenberger's written testimony to the House Oversight Committee in November 2024 lists the claim under 1969, the last year covered by Vallée's first volume. It cites only Basterfield's post.^[7]
• The timeline's version drifts from Vallée's text in three ways. The informant becomes "a former intelligence officer" rather than an engineer. The electrostatic effects become "EM effects". And it notes that the NBS is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).^[1][7]

The Forbidden Science journals

• Forbidden Science is a series of Vallée's diaries, published decade by decade. Volume 1, A Passion for Discovery, covers 1957–1969, and later volumes continue through 2019. Anomalist Books has reissued the series in paperback.^[3][4] Vallée holds a master's degree in astrophysics and a PhD in computer science, worked closely with Project Blue Book's J. Allen Hynek, and later became a venture capitalist in San Francisco.^[4]
• The journals record many conversations with informants. A review of the sixth volume complained that he assumes readers already know the subjects he mentions and rarely says what happened next.^[5] The writer Tanner F. Boyle, who has published a series of "dispatches" on the diaries, describes them as intimate day-by-day records rather than a manual of evidence. He notes that Vallée was often quick to tell who was feeding him a line, though not always.^[6]

Assessment

• The story has passed through at least two people before reaching print: an unnamed engineer, then Vallée's diary. No NBS document describing such an investigation has been found. A detailed history of government UFO interest, UFOs and Government, mentions wartime foo-fighter inquiries but nothing by the NBS.^[1]
• The account is consistent with some known facts: Dryden was at the NBS doing wartime aeronautical work, and U.S. teams did study German aviation research after the war. But these facts do not show that any UFO study took place.^[2][8]

People and topics

• Jacques Vallée — Computer scientist and astronomer, author of the Forbidden Science journals and a central figure in UFO research.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Forbidden Science — Jacques Vallée's published journals.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Hugh Dryden — Aerodynamicist and NASA deputy administrator named in a claim about 1943 UFO studies.
• NASA — The U.S. civilian space agency, created in 1958.

On the Timeline

• Condon Report (15 November 1968) — The Air Force-funded Condon Report concludes that UAP study has added nothing to science.
• Chilean destroyer encounter (1969) (24 October 1969) — A Chilean informant says a navy destroyer was approached by six objects, one larger than the ship.

See every 1969 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Hugh Latimer Dryden”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.