Carter request and NASA's UFO decision (1977)

Carter request and NASA's UFO decision (1977)

Request	Letter from Frank Press, President Carter's science adviser, to NASA, July 1977
Recipient	Robert A. Frosch, NASA Administrator
Proposal	NASA to handle UFO mail and consider a small panel of inquiry
Decision	21 December 1977: no research program or symposium
Reason given	"An absence of tangible or physical evidence"
Outcome	NASA Information Sheet 78-1 (1 February 1978)
Insider account	Richard C. Henry, "UFOs and NASA"
Date	13 December 1977
Topics	Nuclear & missile sites (topic)
People	Jimmy Carter, Frank Press, Robert Frosch
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 82
Year	1977 in UFO history
Timeline	1977 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	4

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter's science adviser, Frank Press, asked NASA whether it should open a new investigation of UFOs. After months of internal debate, NASA Administrator Robert Frosch declined on 21 December 1977. He said there was "an absence of tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis", though NASA would examine any bona fide physical evidence from credible sources.^[1][2] The released NASA file also contains a memo from a NASA safety official urging an investigation. It cited a book's claim that a possible UFO fragment had been examined at Los Alamos.^[4] The historian David Clarke has called the episode NASA's "last strange trip into UFO territory" before its recent UAP study.^[2]

Background

Carter is the only U.S. president to have reported a UFO sighting.^[2] On an evening in 1969, before giving a talk in Leary, Georgia, he and about a dozen others watched a bright light that seemed to approach, hover, change color from blue to red and back to white, and then recede.^[2] He filled out a NICAP questionnaire about it, and the story became public in 1976.^[2] During his campaign he promised that, as president, he would make every piece of information the country had about UFO sightings available to the public and scientists.^[2]

Sources disagree on the sighting's date. NASA's 1978 information sheet says Carter told NICAP on 12 October 1973 that it happened in October 1969 and lasted 10 to 12 minutes.^[3][4] The skeptic Robert Sheaffer established the date as 6 January 1969. He found that Venus was then a brilliant evening "star" in almost exactly the position Carter described.^[2] At the time, Grenada's prime minister Eric Gairy was urging the United Nations to make 1978 "the year of the UFO", and the release of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind raised the political stakes.^[2]

The request

Press, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote to Frosch that the White House was "becoming the focal point for an increasing number of inquiries" about UFOs. He said the Executive Office was ill-equipped to handle them and that the focal point ought to be NASA.^[2][4] He recommended two things:^[2][4]

• NASA should answer the public's UFO letters.
• Since nearly a decade had passed since the Condon Report, a small "panel of inquiry" should look for any significant new findings. It might include well-known figures interested in the subject, such as Carl Sagan, because this was "a public relations problem as much as anything else".

The letter did not mention the president's own interest.^[2] The NASA records date it 21 July 1977, and NASA's information sheet says "July of 1977". Clarke gives 21 June 1977.^[2][4]

Frosch replied on 6 September 1977 that NASA was "inclined to agree", but that a panel would need extra resources and that NASA should first make sure an inquiry was justified.^[4] He proposed naming a NASA project officer to review UFO reports from the previous ten years and recommend by the end of the year whether to go further. Press agreed on 14 September.^[2][4] On 3 November 1977, answering an inquiry from Senator Mark Hatfield's office, NASA said it was studying about ten years of literature. It said a project officer had been assigned, and that no field investigation was under way and no funds had been allocated.^[4]

Inside NASA

The astrophysicist Richard C. Henry, then working at NASA headquarters, later described the internal debate in a paper, "UFOs and NASA", which reproduces the key documents.^[2][4] He explained that NASA headquarters drafted replies from the lowest relevant level upward, with each level initialing the version sent higher. In such a system it was often unclear where a policy finally signed by a senior official had really originated.^[4]

Henry drafted a plan for the space science chief, Noel Hinners, to send to Frosch, but it was never submitted because he was not asked. Under the plan, Stephen Maran of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center would have spent two months full time reviewing post-Condon reports from groups such as APRO. He would have sought comment from skeptics such as Philip Klass and Robert Sheaffer, and reported by 2 January 1978 on whether further work was warranted.^[4]

Instead, David Williamson drafted the critical memorandum, from Hinners to the Administrator, which reached Henry in an envelope marked "EYES ONLY". Henry noted that, like all the NASA documents he saw, it was not classified.^[4] Henry thought the draft "masterful". It formally recommended one option but was written so that any reader would choose the other.^[4] An internal exchange listed the problems a study would face:^[2]

• no hard evidence
• a "plethora of secondary source material" based on human observation
• "the probability of hoaxes"
• "the delicate interface of the Government with any private individual"
• "the danger of projecting an inaccurate NASA image"

It concluded that a formal study "appears fraught with perils".^[2] Henry disagreed with one point: he thought there was in fact "plenty" of physical evidence, "for what it is worth".^[4]

The safety official's memo

The released file includes a memorandum to the Administrator from NASA's Chief of Ground Operations Safety, written using his prerogative to communicate directly with the Administrator. It urged NASA to take up a UFO investigation and made several points:^[4]

• It enclosed Carter's UFO report.
• It cited Gallup polls that more than 15 million Americans had seen UFOs and that 51 percent believed in them.
• It mocked a NASA spokesman, Dave Williamson, who had been quoted as wanting a "little green man" or "a piece of metal from a UFO" before investigating.
• Its second enclosure was pages 26 to 32 of a book, Celestial Passengers: UFO's & Space Travel. The memo said these pages detailed "what could be a piece of a UFO" that had been "thoroughly examined for over two months by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory".

The testimony this article draws on dates the memo to December 1977.^[1] The earlier version of this article said the memo had not been found in published NASA records. In fact it appears in the NASA UFO documents compiled by The Black Vault.^[4] The memo itself only relays the book's claim. No Los Alamos analysis appears in the released file.^[4]

NASA's decision

Frosch's letter to Press of 21 December 1977, drafted by Williamson, said NASA would keep answering public inquiries. If "some new element of hard evidence" came to its attention, a NASA laboratory could analyze "an otherwise unexplained organic or inorganic sample".^[4] But he wrote that "there is an absence of tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis". He said that without such evidence NASA could not devise "a sound scientific procedure", and that a research task without a disciplinary framework "would be wasteful and probably unproductive". He therefore proposed that NASA "take no steps to establish a research activity in this area or to convene a symposium on this subject".^[2][4] He added that NASA retained "an open mind, a keen sense of scientific curiosity". There was no mention of the promised project officer or review.^[4]

Henry called the letter "remarkable". Despite his access to what he labeled "the secret NASA UFO file", he said he could not fully explain how and why the decision was made, concluding that "there is only fragmentary evidence".^[2][4] He left NASA in autumn 1978 to return to Johns Hopkins University.^[4] When the physicist Harley Rutledge asked for NASA support for his UFO research in January 1978, Hinners's reply, drafted by Henry, quoted Frosch's position and declined.^[4]

Information Sheet 78-1

NASA set out its position in Information Sheet 78-1, dated 1 February 1978. It was released to The Black Vault in 1997 from Defense Department files.^[3] It made these points:^[3][4]

• NASA was the focal point for UFO inquiries to the White House, but neither NASA nor any other agency had a UFO research program.
• It listed civilian UFO groups, from NICAP and MUFON to the skeptics' committee.
• Astronaut sightings had all been satisfactorily explained.
• Carter's sighting had been placed in NICAP's "unidentified" category, while "some students of aerial phenomena" suggested he had seen Venus.
• NASA would return unsolicited UFO material to senders.

Clarke contrasts NASA's 1977 resistance with its willingness to study UAP decades later.^[2]

People and topics

• NASA — The U.S. civilian space agency, created in 1958.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Los Alamos National Laboratory — The New Mexico laboratory where the atomic bomb was designed.
• Jimmy Carter — 39th U.S. president, who reported a UFO sighting and asked NASA about UFO research.
• Frank Press — President Carter's science adviser.
• Robert Frosch — NASA administrator who declined to start a UFO program in 1977.
• Freedom of Information Act — The 1966 U.S. law that lets the public request government records.
• The Black Vault — John Greenewald's online archive of government documents.

On the Timeline

• Mario Woods incident at Ellsworth AFB (1977) (November 1977) — An Ellsworth AFB security airman says a UAP answered his spotlight signals.
• Project Windfall claim (1978) — John Keel says the CIA ran Project Windfall, an investigation of UAP contactees.

See every 1977 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References