Aftermath: The Robertson Panel
The extremely high numbers of UFO reports in 1952 disturbed both the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both groups felt that an enemy nation could deliberately flood the U.S. with false UFO reports, causing mass panic and allowing them to launch a sneak attack. On September 24, 1952, the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) sent a memorandum to Walter B. Smith, the CIA's Director. The memo stated that "the flying saucer situation . . . have national security implications . . . the public concern with the phenomena . . . lies the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic." The result of this memorandum was the creation in January 1953 of the Robertson Panel. Physicist Howard Percy Robertson chaired the panel, which consisted of prominent scientists and which spent four days examining the "best" UFO cases collected by Project Blue Book. The panel dismissed nearly all of the UFO cases it examined as not representing anything unusual or threatening to national security. In the panel's controversial estimate, the Air Force and Project Blue Book needed to spend less time analyzing and studying UFO reports and more time publicly debunking them. The panel recommended that the Air Force and Project Blue Book should take steps to "strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired." Following the Panel's report, Project Blue Book would rarely publicize any UFO case that it had not labeled as "solved"; unsolved cases were rarely mentioned by the Air Force.
Read more about this topic: 1952 Washington D.C. UFO Incident