UFO Inquiry Is Attacked as Nonscientific
By JOHN LANNAN
Star Staff Writer
If there's any one element on which all parties to the Unidentified Flying Object
controversy agree, it's the fact that every thing about UFOs is up in the air.
And the situation didn't change a bit yesterday as the Leader of the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena announced in State Department tone
and rhetoric that "we have broken relations" with a government-funded UF0 investigation.
Retired Marine Corps Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe charged that the University of Colorado
study headed by physicist Edward U. Condon was anything but scientific and that
Condon and the resident project head were openly biased.
The move followed publication in Look magazine of a report of deceptive memos,
staff firings and a negative outlook on UFOs by the project leaders.
Series of Tempests
The current UFO crisis is but one of a series of tempests surrounding the
oft-reported, but scientifically undocumented, sightings of strange saucer-like
forms and shapes in flight.
Long under study by the Air Force in several separate projects, UFOs have managed
to move even the studiously academic scientific community as well as government into
supporting an objective study. NICAP, one of the less strident, but no-nonetheless
dedicated parties, claims it also wants a balanced, scientific appraisal of the problem.
At its behest, and at that of others, the government financed a $500,000 project
to answer UFO questions.
NICAP, which also challenged the earlier Air Force probes,
now terms that study the "Colorado Fiasco."
Message to Johnson
Maj. Keyhoe announced at yesterday's press conference that he has also written
President Johnson apprising him of NICAP's views
and asking a new study.
Before the session turned into a nose-to-nose confrontation between Keyhoe and
author Philip Klass over Klass' allegations that UFOs are a form of ball lightning,
Keyhoe read portions of a memo allegedly (1) from the project leader, Robert Low, to the
university of Colorado's vice president, Thurston Manning.
In it, Low is alleged to have said that to enter such a study objectively, "one
has to admit the possibility that such things as UFOs exist. It is not respectable
to give serious consideration to such a possibility."
Further, the memo continued:
"The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it
would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present
the image of a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an
almost zero expectation of finding a saucer..."
Maj. Keyhoe also charged that the investigating staff of the project was made up
chiefly of psychologists whose goals were to examine the credibility of the witnesses
rather than their purported evidence for sightings.
NICAP does not argue, he added, that either Low or Condon was being dishonest. "Both
seemed to believe they were being correct in their approach, (2)" he said.
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