The 1960s. Project Blue Book is operating and the Condon Report closes it. The decade carries the entire conflict between the Air Force's investigative work and its institutional position on what that work was about.
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The University of Colorado study, directed by physicist Edward Condon and contracted by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, ran for roughly 18 months starting October 1966. Its central finding was that 21 years of UFO investigation had added nothing to scientific knowledge and that further large-scale inquiry was 'probably not justified.' The report explicitly invited dissent, Condon stated his conclusions 'will not be uncritically accepted, nor should they be', and its appendices include the 1947 Twining letter, one of the earliest written military acknowledgments of unidentified aerial objects in the record.
→ The Condon Report (DTIC AD0680975)
Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans Jr. closed Project Blue Book on December 17, 1969, citing the Condon Report, a National Academy of Sciences review, and the prior Robertson Panel and O'Brien Committee findings, all converging on the same conclusion: no national-security threat, no technology beyond known science, no evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles. Records went to the USAF Archives at Maxwell AFB. The press release deferred the defense question to 'defense specialists rather than research scientists', language that left room for classified surveillance work to continue outside any public program.
→ Project Blue Book Termination Press Release, 1969
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