The late Dr. James E. McDonald - who held the title "Senior Physicist, Institute of Atmospheric Physics" at the University of Arizona - is one of the very few scientists to actually study the UFO phenomenon. In a prepared statement before the U.S. Congress' House Committee on Science and Astronautics, delivered on July 29, 1968, McDonald said this:
"From time to time in the history of science, situations have arisen in which a problem of ultimately enormous importance went begging for adequate attention simply because that problem appeared to involve phenomena so far outside the current bounds of scientific knowledge that it was not even regarded as a legitimate subject of serious scientific concern. That is precisely the situation in which the UFO problem now lies. One of the principal results of my own recent intensive study of the UFO enigma is this: I have become convinced that the scientific community, not only in this country but throughout the world, has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance." 1And how did McDonald arrive at that opinion? After several authorized, extended visits to the U.S. Air Force's UFO Project Blue Book, to review its files, he wrote, "There are hundreds of good cases in the Air Force files that should have led to top-level scientific scrutiny of [UFOs] years ago, yet these cases have been swept under the rug in a most disturbing way by Project Blue Book investigators and their consultants."2
McDonald's full statement before Congress may be found in the U.S. Congressional Record, as well as on the Internet. While acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings undoubtedly had prosaic explanations, and that a great many questions about the phenomenon remained unanswered, McDonald succinctly summarized his conclusions regarding the most credible of the unexplained cases: "My own present opinion, based on two years of careful study, is that UFOs are probably extraterrestrial devices engaged in something that might very tentatively be termed 'surveillance.'"3
(c) Unknown
Dr. James E. McDonald
SMOKE SCREEN
McDonald was not the only one to conclude that UFOs represented a genuine mystery worthy of rigorous investigation. Although most scientists today are completely unaware of this fact, in the late 1960s, the first U.S. government-sponsored scientific study of the UFO phenomenon - informally known as the Condon Committee - actually found persuasive evidence to support the contention that UFOs are something other than manmade or natural phenomena.
However, as I shall discuss shortly, this startling finding was effectively masked in the project's final report through a spectacularly successful sleight-of-hand by the study's own director, physicist Dr. Edward Condon, whose blatantly anti-UFO bias was a already matter-of-record well before the report was released in late 1968.
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