Dewey Fournet's motion study and Navy inquiry

Dewey Fournet's motion study and Navy inquiry

Person	Maj. Dewey J. Fournet, USAF, Directorate of Intelligence, Pentagon (1951–1953)
Role	Ran the Pentagon UFO desk; liaison to Project Blue Book
Study	Top-secret UFO motion study, fall 1952, written up about December 1952
Conclusion	Formation flying and manoeuvres showed intelligent control; ETH the best explanation
Presented	To the CIA's Robertson Panel, Friday 16 January 1953
Surviving trace	"UFO Formations" handout attached to a CIA letter of 27 January 1953
Navy inquiry	Claimed in later accounts; not documented
Date	1951
Topics	Government programs (topic), Congress & law (topic), Ocean & underwater (topic)
People	Dewey Fournet, Edward Ruppelt, Donald Keyhoe, Michael Swords
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 42
Year	1951 in UFO history
Timeline	1951 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

Dewey Fournet was a U.S. Air Force major who, in 1951–1952, handled UFO matters in the Directorate of Intelligence at the Pentagon and served as liaison to Project Blue Book.^[1][2] In late 1952 he prepared a top-secret study of UFO motions arguing that some showed intelligent control. He presented it to the CIA's Robertson Panel in January 1953.^[1][2][6] The full study has never been found, but part of it survives as a set of diagrams in CIA files.^[1] A separate claim that he ran a Navy-assisted inquiry into undersea and aerial phenomena rests on later accounts, not released records.^[1]

At the Pentagon

In late 1951 and 1952 the climate in Air Force intelligence changed.^[1] When Maj. Gen. John Samford became Director of Intelligence, with Gen. William M. Garland as his chief assistant, three consistently negative figures left or lost influence:^[1]

• Brig. Gen. Ernest Moore
• Col. Edward Porter
• Maj. Aaron "Jerry" Boggs, who had manned the UFO analysis desk

Fournet, "an intelligent man, a pilot, and an engineer", took over that desk. His superior, Col. William A. Adams, was also sympathetic to the subject.^[1] According to Donald Keyhoe, in civilian life Fournet had been in charge of special investigations and analyses for the Texaco Company before being recalled to active duty for the UFO job.^[3]

Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt called him "our liaison officer in the Pentagon" and said "Dewey's word swung a lot of weight". He described Fournet as "probably the most thoroughly convinced believer that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships that I knew". The two argued "by the hour".^[1] Ruppelt felt Fournet took witness reports too much at "face value". Fournet, for his part, regarded Ruppelt as a good colleague and an honest man.^[1] Keyhoe wrote that Fournet urged Samford to relax the publicity policy. Fournet also opposed the temperature-inversion explanation given at the Pentagon press conference after the July 1952 Washington sightings.^[3]

The motion study

Ruppelt recalled spending a day at the Pentagon with Fournet and two of his bosses, Col. Adams and Col. Weldon Smith, discussing "a new concept". The idea was to test whether UFO motions were random or ordered: ordered motion would be "proof that the UFOs were something that was intelligently controlled".^[1] Fournet worked on the study in the autumn of 1952 and wrote it up as an almost polished report in about December 1952, shortly before leaving the service. He later said he knew it was completed and classified Top Secret, but he never saw the final copy.^[1]

Ruppelt described the method. The study covered several hundred detailed reports and eliminated any that could have been caused by known objects, leaving only ten or twenty unknowns. It argued that these showed control by beings "with brains equal to or far surpassing ours". Having ruled out "Earthlings", it left "spacemen".^[6] The report circulated at high levels of intelligence, but "no one would stick his neck out and officially send it to the top".^[6] Keyhoe's account of it was larger still: he said it drew on three years' study and 2,500 cases.^[3] Fournet later said he had prepared it "primarily as a weapon for use against the apathy and/or bias on the subject which prevailed in certain official quarters". He said it showed the probability of intelligent control, which implied "the further possibility" of an extraterrestrial origin.^[1]

The Robertson Panel

The CIA-sponsored panel of scientists chaired by Howard P. Robertson first met on 14 January 1953.^[2] By then Fournet had left active duty, and he was called back from Houston to speak.^[6] On the third day, Friday 16 January, he presented his case, using several of the study's cases. He argued that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the best explanation for some puzzling reports.^[1][2] Ruppelt said the panel's questioning showed it was giving the conclusions "serious thought".^[6] Its final report nevertheless concluded that UFOs posed no direct threat and could largely be explained. It recommended a public education campaign to reduce interest in the subject.^[2][4] Ruppelt wrote that Fournet was "thoroughly hacked about the decision of the panel".^[1] A briefcase said to have held the files Fournet used for the panel was later passed to the researcher David Marler for display at the National Historical UFO Records Center.^[3]

The reconstruction

The historian Michael Swords partly reconstructed the study from a page the CIA released. It was attached to a letter of 27 January 1953 from H. Marshall Chadwell of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence to the MIT physicist Julius Stratton.^[1] The page, titled "UFO Formations", bore the note "Basis for Maj. Fournet's presentation to OSI Advisory Grp".^[1] The researcher Jan Aldrich recognized it. Working with Bill Murphy and Frank John Reid, Swords matched most of its seventeen numbered diagrams to formation sightings from Fournet's time on the desk. Among them:^[1]

• Case 1. George Air Force Base, California, 1 May 1952.
• Case 2. Furman University astronomers, Greenville, South Carolina, 13 May 1952.
• Case 6. The Nash–Fortenberry airline sighting over Chesapeake Bay, 14 July 1952.
• Case 11. Two lieutenant colonels in a B-25 over Carson Sink, Nevada, 24 July 1952.
• Case 13. The Scripps-Howard reporter Doyle Kline's sighting at Albuquerque, about 29–30 July 1952.
• Case 17. An Air National Guard F-84G pilot near El Paso, 24 August 1952.

Swords argued that the find proved the study was real and that the Air Force had denied it. He also said that case 13 does not appear in Blue Book files, suggesting that some reports reached the Pentagon but never reached Blue Book.^[1] He suspected the full study had two parts, formation flying and advanced manoeuvres, and that only the formation diagrams were handed out.^[1]

Later role

After leaving active duty in January 1953, Fournet served on the board of the civilian group NICAP.^[1][3] Ruppelt called him "the unidentified source of a lot of Keyhoe's information".^[1] Keyhoe described their confidential meetings in the presence of the Air Force press officer Al Chop, after Samford had barred project officers from talking to the press.^[3] Fournet and Chop cleared several cases for Keyhoe's 1953 book Flying Saucers from Outer Space, some of them also among the motion-study cases.^[1][5]

The Navy inquiry claim

A claim that Fournet ran a private, Navy-assisted inquiry into undersea and aerial UAP, sometimes linked to the name "Operation Interloper", comes mainly from later accounts rather than released Air Force or Navy records.^[1][8] Swords, who reconstructed much of Fournet's work, describes the motion study as his own initiative and does not document a separate Navy project.^[1] A NICAP file on the Navy pilot Graham Bethune is cited in connection with the Navy claim, but it could not be retrieved.^[7] The Navy's main documented role in this period was its photo analysts' study of the 1952 Tremonton, Utah, film, which they presented to the same panel.^[1][6]

People and topics

• Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Dewey Fournet — Pentagon Air Force intelligence liaison to Project Blue Book who produced a 1952 study of UFO motions.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Edward Ruppelt — Head of Project Blue Book in 1952–53 and author of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Robertson Panel — Robertson Panel
• NICAP — The leading U.S. civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s.
• Donald Keyhoe — Retired Marine officer, author and director of NICAP who campaigned against UFO secrecy.
• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Michael Swords — Historian of the Air Force UFO projects.

On the Timeline

• Proposal to collect UFO home movies (1950) (6 July 1950) — An Air Force officer wants to quietly collect UAP home movies from the public with FBI help.
• Urner Liddel's Skyhook balloon explanation (27 February 1951) — A Navy physicist publicly says all UAP reports are mirages or balloons.

See every 1951 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

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