A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

scenario. The document was allegedly dismissed by Air Force command as insufficiently
substantiated and ordered destroyed. In the ensuing months, Project Sign relieved members of
the pro-e.t. contingent who were replaced by skeptics. At this point, the official goal of the
project became the reduction of the numbers of “unexplained” cases by the provision of
conventional explanations. At the end of 1948, the project was renamed Grudge. By the end of
the following year, Grudge’s files had been mothballed and the project was all but discontinued.
Interest in pursuing UFO research was renewed following a series of sightings and radar
trackings of fast moving aerial objects near Fort Monmouth, New Jersey in 1951. This renewed
interest led to yet another change in classification. In March of 1952, Project Grudge became
project Blue Book. The early phase of Blue Book was the closest the Air Force came to entering
into committed long-term scientific investigation of UFO phenomena. One proposed action at
the time was the building of automated surveillance systems in corridors where concentrations of
sightings had been reported. University of Arizona Atmospheric physicist and noted UFO
researcher James E. McDonald commented that
the 24 months from October, 1951 through September, 1953, emerged as a kind of
“heroic period” of Air Force investigations…the one interval during which UFO’s were
seriously and relatively vigorously investigated….[S]hortly after 1953 began a sort of
new dark age when debunking and superficial investigations once again came to
characterize [Blue Book’s] response to the UFO problem. 201
Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 was released to the public on October 25, 1955 and
was broadly held to discredit the existence of UFO’s – even though critics pointed out that close
study of the report suggests a conclusion at variance with the official position. 202
Throughout
the remainder of its existence, up until 1969, when the Air Force terminated the project, Blue
Book remained a project concerned, according to Air Force Regulation 202, with reducing “the
201 Quoted in Jerome Clark, “Project Blue Book,” in The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial (Detroit:
Visible Ink, 1998) 466-467.
202 Dr. J. Allen Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report (Dell: New York, 1977)
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