James E. Mc Donald - UFO Studies

UFO Studies

In 1954, while driving through the Arizona desert with two meteorologists, McDonald spotted an unidentified flying object none of the men could readily identify. Though a rather unspectacular sighting of a distant point of light, this sighting would spur McDonald's interest in UFOs. By the late 1950s he was quietly investigating UFO reports in Arizona, and he had also joined NICAP, then the largest and most prominent civilian UFO research group in the nation. Given his training in atmospheric physics, McDonald was able to examine UFO reports in greater detail than most other scientists, and was able to offer explanations for some previously unexplained reports. Using his security clearance with the US government, he also uncovered a number of well-documented UFO reports from the US Air Force's Project Blue Book, which he judged deeply puzzling even after stringent analysis.

By the mid-1960s, McDonald began speaking about UFOs more openly. McDonald's first detailed, public discussion of UFOs was in a lecture given before an American Meteorological Society assembly in Washington D.C. on October 5, 1966. Entitled "The Problem of UFOs", McDonald's speech was the first of many given to an overflow audience. McDonald declared that scientific scrutiny should be directed towards the small number of "unknowns", which he defined as a UFO reported by a "credible and trained observer as machine-like 'craft' which remained unidentified in spite of careful investigation." He noted that the vast majority of UFOs could become Identified flying objects, and, in his estimation, only about 1% of UFOs were true "unknowns". McDonald also lambasted the U.S. Air Force for what he saw as their inept handling of UFO studies.

In 1967 the Office of Naval Research granted McDonald a small budget in order to conduct his own UFO research, ostensibly to study the idea that some UFOs were misidentified clouds. He was able to peruse the files of Project Blue Book at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and eventually concluded that the Air Force was mishandling UFO evidence. Following the Robertson Panel's recommendations in 1953, the Air Force was following a debunking directive towards UFO reports, and only discussing UFO cases which were considered solved by a mundane explanation. All unexplained UFO cases were classified "secret" and not released to the public (see Robertson Panel for further information).

McDonald was particularly disturbed that astronomer J. Allen Hynek, had not alerted the scientific community to the fact that Project Blue Book was withholding some of the most anomalous and compelling UFO reports. Hynek argued that if he had exposed this, the Air Force would have dumped him as Blue Book's consultant; Hynek was the only scientist formally studying UFOs for the government. This was the beginning of a rift between the men that would never be entirely reconciled.

From the mid-1960s, McDonald devoted much of his time to trying to persuade journalists, politicians and his colleagues that UFOs were the most pressing issue facing American science. He gave dozens of lectures, and wrote volumes of letters to newspapers, to his peers (especially at scientific journals) and to politicians. McDonald wrote to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, arguing that they needed to radically shift what he saw as their superficial perspective towards UFOs. In response, the Air Force determined that they needed to "fireproof" themselves against McDonald's statements because of his unquestionable qualifications and credibility.

He managed to secure limited support from a few prominent figures, such as United Nations Secretary General U Thant, who arranged for McDonald to speak to the UN's Outer Space Affairs Group on June 7, 1967. Additionally in 1967, McDonald noted, "There is no sensible alternative to the utterly shocking hypothesis that UFOs are extraterrestrial probes".

In his Statement on Unidentified Objects to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, McDonald made the following remarks regarding types of UFO accounts.

The scope of the present statement precludes anything approaching an exhaustive listing of categories of UFO phenomena: much of what might be made clear at great length will have to be compressed into my remark that the scientific world at large is in for a shock when it becomes aware of the astonishing nature of the UFO phenomenon and its bewildering complexity. I make that terse comment well aware that it invites easy ridicule; but intellectual honesty demands that I make clear that my two years' study convinces me that in the UFO problem lie scientific and technological questions that will challenge the ability of the world's outstanding scientists to explain - as soon as they start examining the facts.

In the same statement, he said he had "become convinced that the scientific community ... has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance."

McDonald often used guarded wording in his discussions of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, such as once describing the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the "least unsatisfactory" explanation for UFOs. He seemed to regard the extraterrestrial hypothesis not as unimpeachable fact, but as a working model. McDonald's acquaintance George Early, a prominent engineer with the United Aircraft Association and also a NICAP member, said, "I don't think Jim was 100% sold on the UFOs being extraterrestrial spacecraft with beings in them ... His essential thrust was that here is a topic worthy of scientific study which has not been studied scientifically, and we should find out what the answer is. He had a definite commitment to the truth, and if the truth turned out to be something else, he wouldn't have backed away from it".