Project Blue Book


 * This page is about the UFO study done by sane people. For frothing lunacy, see Project Blue Beam.

Project Blue Book was a United States Air Force study into unidentified flying objects, conducted from 1952 until 1970. The Air Force summary of the results is
 * 1) No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
 * 2) There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
 * 3) There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" were extraterrestrial vehicles.

By the time Project Blue Book ended, it had collected 12,618 UFO reports, and concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft. 718 were not conclusively identified, but did not defy the science or technology of the time.

Also, the whole archive of reports (minus names and similar personal information) is available through the Freedom of Information Act and, of course, online.

Faced with the overwhelming evidence, all of which they could review themselves, conspiracy theorists the world over realised they were wasting their time on this rubbish, turned over a new leaf and did sane things instead.

TV adaptation
Jack Webb, known for producing cop shows like Dragnet and Adam-12 in the 1960s, turned to Project Bluebook as his inspiration for the 1970s TV series Project UFO.

Although the incidents portrayed in Project UFO were based on real incidents described in Project Bluebook, the series took a lot of liberties with the cases. For example, the pilot episode showed a jet fighter chasing after a UFO and having its engine "mysteriously" conk out; in the real incident, the plane was a propeller-driven fighter whose engine conked out because its pilot flew it far above its service ceiling and starved the engine of air.

In the case of The "Sighting 4020: The Island Incident" the show goes totally off the rails as the reveal at the end is a close up the "scalpel" given by the aliens as the native witch doctor talks about it: "5081 A.D." One has to ask just what was real in that episode and what came out of the writer's imagination.