Robertson Panel - The Robertson Panel

The Robertson Panel

The Robertson Panel first met formally on January 14, 1953 under the direction of Howard Percy Robertson. He was a physicist, a CIA consultant, and the director of the Defense Department Weapons Evaluation Group. He was instructed by OSI to assemble a group of prominent scientists to review the Air Force's UFO files. In preparation for this, Robertson first personally reviewed Air Force files and procedures. The Air Force had recently commissioned the Battelle Memorial Institute to scientifically study all of the UFO reports collected by Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book. Robertson hoped to draw on their statistical results, but Battelle insisted that they needed much more time to conduct a proper study. Other panel members were respected scientists who had worked on other classified military projects or studies. All were then sceptical of UFO reports, though to varying degrees. Apart from Robertson, the panel included:

• Luis Alvarez, physicist, radar expert (and later, a Nobel Prize recipient);
• Frederick C. Durant, CIA officer, secretary to the panel and missile expert;
• Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, Brookhaven National Laboratories nuclear physicist
• Thornton Page, astrophysicist, radar expert, deputy director of Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office;
• Lloyd Berkner, physicist,
• J. Allen Hynek, astronomer and consultant to Blue Book presented to the panel, but was not a full member.

Most of what is known about the actual proceedings of the meetings comes from notes kept by Durant which were later submitted as a memo to the NSC and commonly referred to as the Durant Report. In addition, various participants would later comment on what transpired from their perspective. Captain (later Major) Edward Ruppelt, then head of Project Blue Book, first revealed the existence of the secret panel in his 1956 book, but without revealing names of panel members.