Sanctioned UFO Searches
Is the truth really out there? It’s an age-old question, with reports of UFOs going back decades. We looked back at actual UFO and alien investigations by the U.S. and other countries. Check it out!
Projects Sign and Grudge – 1948-1951
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Many accounts of UFOs in the United States describe something called the Roswell incident. Local accounts of a “flying saucer” landing near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 led to many alien conspiracy theories, but the U.S. Air Force denied an E.T. connection. In the 1990s, the Air Force said the object was actually a balloon that was searching for Soviet Union nuclear test signals under Project Mogul.
However, the incident did prompt official U.S. investigations into unidentified flying objects in the next few years. A report published for the U.S. Air Force’s Project Sign (1948-1949) stated that the things people saw were “real” but that at least “some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena” and others may be related to domestic or foreign aircraft. The Air Force’s Project Grudge, which issued a report in 1949 prior to its shutdown in 1951, continued the investigation but found no conclusive evidence of UFOs.
Project Blue Book – 1952-1969
U.S. Air Force
Project Blue Book was yet another program from the U.S. Air Force, following up on Projects Sign and Grudge. The program conducted a series of studies between 1952 and 1969 to figure out if UFOs could hurt national security and to search for UFO data. More than 10,000 of those case files are freely available on the Internet Archive.
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, investigators ultimately collected more than 12,000 sightings and classified them as either “identified” (meaning the events could be explained by astronomical, atmospheric or human phenomena) or “unidentified.” That category made up about 6 percent of the total number of reported cases.
The Condon Committee – 1966-1968
Dutton
The Condon Committee, more formally known as the University of Colorado UFO Project, was a group funded by the Air Force that looked at UFOs under leadership from physicist Edward Condon. The group re-examined the information from Project Blue Book and published its efforts in the “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects” (also known as the Condon Report) in 1968.
According to How Stuff Works, the Condon Report found that about one-third of the cases couldn’t be explained, even though the introduction stated that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified on the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
Some reports say that the ultimate purpose of the report was to stop U.S. investigations into UFOs. Whether or not that was true, Blue Book ceased operations in 1969, the year after the Condon Report was released.
Read More – UFO Watch: 8 Times the Government Looked for Flying Saucers
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