UFO! Unidentified Flying Objects - Project Blue Book and Me

When I was 10 years old, I had a correspondence with the United States Air Force (USAF) and Project Blue Book. I wrote back and forth to Donald Keyhoe of the Project Blue Book investigations of Unidentified Flying Objects. His correspondence on USAF letter head and the official forms he sent me led me to believe he was a member of the USAF and the commander of the project.

I had begun writing to him in a student assignment for a science unit at school. Mr. Keyhoe sent me letters urging me to continue studying UFOs, along with protocol sheets upon which to record UFO sightings.

At school, my teacher was instructing us in an earth and aerospace unit in order to show us the solar system and NASA was continually in the news, so this qualified as current events as well. Since current events often mentioned UFO sightings, we discussed sightings in the news, bringing in pictures from the newspapers and magazines of unidentified flying objects. Some of these turned out to be faked photographs. Some of the objects were photos of ceiling light fixtures taken upside down.

The only thing any of us children saw along these lines in real life were some weather balloons made of a shiny new substance called mylar . 

 Photos this page, in the public domain.

At any rate, I was assigned to write to Donald Keyhoe of Project Blue Book, explain that our class was studying earth science and the UFO phenomenon in America, and ask for any materials he could share with a classroom. He readily replied and seemed anxious to gather any information from us about any actual UFOs we did see in our studies. I received a couple of letters and a recording sheet for UFO sightings, but no classroom materials such as NASA readily distributes today. There were no pictures, no display cards, no videos, no coloring books, etc. However, we discovered that he was actually a writer that would publish a book about UFOs, rather than the commander of the USAF UFO project.

When I received the materials from Mr. Keyhoe, I took them to school. However, my teacher did not seem to think that they were very important and did not discuss them in class. When she returned them to me, I took them back home, my mother threw them away. This was disappointing, because while I never saw anything unidentified in the air except weather balloons, other people in Ohio were seeing them. In addition, on the east side of our city near a rural area sat an aircraft manufacturing that was producing experimental aircraft. There were stories about aircraft rising straight up into the air and if making sharp left and right turns during silentflying. No noise - just some lights and an occasional hum. I encountered such a site about 15 years later and that story is at the following link: Spirit, Angel or UFO?

The correspondence from Donald Keyhoe would be an important piece of history today, as well as a collector's item and interesting memorabilia. As a child, I often wondered why the adults were so fast to destroy the materials and as an adult I have heard a constant stream of conspiracy theories arise and circulate.

The fact that Keyhoe wrote back to a 10-year old girl was unique in itself, and I think it shows his eagerness to find UFOs wherever they might be and from whomever saw them. Other people were just as eager to disband Project Blue Book and stop people for talking about it. For example, during the middle years of Project Blue Book, it was written "If a child reported a UFO, policy dictated it automatically be attributed to an overactive imagination." I myself never got a chance to record one!

I would have donated the letters and record sheets to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base Museum if I had been able to keep them, or had copies posted on the most comprehensive UFO site in existence, The Black Vault. Perhaps they would have been destroyed at the USAF base. I have had some associations with individuals serving on the base and I have seen a copy of a set of black and white photo circulated on base of supposed aliens retrieved from the Roswell, New Mexico UFO crash site. They look fake to me and they were made long before PhotoShop and the Internet existed publicly.

The species of man early on seemed to wonder about life elsewhere besides on the solid ground of the earth. From paintings in caves, on mountainsides, and in passages of some pyramids, we can see a fascination with lights and ships in the skies. There are other representations of underwater worlds and of men living in the center of the earth as well.

Thus, the notions of extraterrestrial life and of the undersea world of Atlantis are long-lived and date back at least multiple thousands of years ago. Add to all this the evidence of Crop Circles and large designs and graphics made suddenly and unseen in the middle of the night in giant reaches of sand as well as in wheat and corn stalks, and we have Unidentified actions and phenomena of many kinds.

I continue to watch the news and documentary programs concerning these types of events and await a final conclusion about the existence of extraterrestrials.

Science Fiction, World War II and the 1950s

The first science fiction conventions in America were held around 1935, based on the writings of HG Wells, Edgar rice Burroughs and new science fiction writers that were very good. The notion of going to the moon took hold and the romance of the possibility of life on other planets ala Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and other tales spread. Pulp publications and "dime novels" provided a steady stream of sci-fi stories, some of them classics.

During WWII, unexplained aircraft failures were sometimes blamed on "gremlins", small destructive creatures that became legends among the military and later, commercial pilots and aircraft mechanics. Meanwhile, pilots were beginning to see unexplained things in the sky - lights, objects, even ships with portholes through which they could see a face. The supposed alien spaceship crash in Roswell, New Mexico was reported in 1947 and the media was silenced on it by the government. The cover up and conspiracy theories began in full force and remain active to this day.

A new wave of UFO sightings began in 1952, but Project Blue Book spanned the years 1951 - 1969 and seemed ready for the resurgence. Dr. Hynek, a USAF astronomy advisor, even published a UFO Field Manual in the early 1950s. Soon, test pilots and astronauts were seeing UFOs. By 1969, the Condon Commission was formed, studied the circumstances, and concluded that of 91 cases studied, 61 were misinterpretations or hoaxes and 31 remained unidentified. Project Blue Book was shut down abruptly more or less because it was "considered a waste of time." Many disagreed.

These incidents are described in this link: Project Blue Book by Michael Hall. A link at the bottom of the page will take you to the Home Page of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, with a link to Project Blue Book Archives on the list.

UFOs have been sighted for 1000s of years, so they did not begin with Roswell, New Mexico. Some of the m may be products of earth, ignited by early science fiction and mankind's desire to make fiction to facts.

In fact, in 1935, Canada was testing a flying saucer that could fly 8 to 10 feet above ground at around 35 miles an hour. In a workshop in an aerospace science convention I attended a few years ago, a former member of the Canadian Space Agency, an engineer-designer, informed us that the Canadian government had prevented several advanced ships from being built and used on a wide scale, from prior to WWII to today. Is this the basis for "UFOs" - experimental aircraft?

Maybe what characters said in the Pogo comic strip of the 1960s was correct: "We have met the enemy and they are us."

I'm not sure we will live long enough to know all the answers about UFOs...