Project Blue Book: The Air Force's UFO Files

Two lights pace your car down a night highway, and by the time you brake they are gone, so, being thorough, you write the thing up and mail it to the Air Force. For twenty years, that report would have had somewhere to go: a green filing cabinet at Wright-Patterson where the United States decided, on the record, whether the sky was behaving.

From Sign to Blue Book

The American military studied flying saucers for over twenty years, and Project Blue Book was the longest and best known of those efforts. It followed Project Sign, opened in 1948 after the post-war sighting wave, and Project Grudge, its more dismissive successor. Blue Book proper began in 1952, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, under Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the officer usually credited with coining the term "unidentified flying object" to replace the sillier "flying saucer."

Its consultant was J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer hired to explain sightings away as stars, weather balloons and aircraft. He did plenty of that. But over the years Hynek shifted from house skeptic to cautious proponent, frustrated by cases he could not dismiss, and later devised the "close encounters" scale that gave Spielberg a title.

The numbers and the verdict

By its end Blue Book had logged 12,618 reports. Of those, 701 were classified as genuinely unidentified — not proof of anything, but not explained either, which is a stubborn fraction to leave on the table. The busiest moment came in July 1952, when radar operators and pilots tracked unknown objects over Washington, D.C. across two weekends, prompting headlines and a hasty Air Force press conference blaming temperature inversions.

Pressure for an outside opinion led to a University of Colorado study under the physicist Edward Condon. The Condon Report, released in 1968, concluded that two decades of UFO study had produced nothing of scientific value and recommended no further work. On that basis the Air Force announced Blue Book's closure in December 1969.

What closing the file did not close

Critics have picked at the Condon Report ever since, noting that its dismissive summary sat awkwardly on top of case files that were not all so tidy, and that the project's real job may have been public reassurance as much as investigation — a suspicion the 1953 CIA-convened Robertson Panel, which urged debunking to reduce public interest, did little to dispel.

What Blue Book could not do was make the 701 go away. Those remain unidentified today, and the modern era of government interest, with the Pentagon's UAP task force and the congressional hearings of the 2020s, is in a sense the same drawer reopened, with better cameras and the same unfinished list.

Below, readers have filed their own sightings, some of which might once have landed in that green cabinet, and voted them True, Fake or Not sure. Read the official verdict, then return your own.