Ufology needs a Blue Book mind-set (sort of)

While the United States Navy remains UFO oriented with an ongoing and above Top Secret program, the Air Force’s UFO program went underground after the Condon Report and the alleged demise of Project Blue Book.

(We assume that Blue Book didn’t get a different incarnation.)

So what can ufologists take from that beleaguered study?

The Air Force’s Blue Book methodology wasn’t flawed but the ultimate conclusions were skewered, for reasons of incompetence or purposeful disinformation, or any number of other reasons (such as an inability to make sense of the flying saucer/UFO sightings the project gathered information on).

Blue Book took, as you know, UFO data and evaluated it, coming to bizarre conclusions in many instances.

But even after trying to flummox followers of the “study,” there ended up being over seven hundred sightings that the Air Force couldn’t explain away, as the Keyhoe argot put it.



What “ufology” should do – and not with those old, hammered sightings – is gather data from current sightings, and evaluate that data.

No one is doing that.

Sure, MUFON and other UFO organizations are gathering data, scads of it, but no one, and we mean no one is evaluating, using scientific methodologies, any of that data.

Yes, there are extrapolations by a few ufologists (Rudiak, Sparks, Maccabee, et al.) but those extrapolations are discursive and incomplete, by a long shot.



Blue Book had the right idea; it just wasn’t carried out properly, for reasons cited above.

But the modus was right.

Collect data, collate it (as the robot scientist in the first “Alien” movie had it), and come to a consensus or something more concrete than a consensus.



Can ufologists or anyone in the UFO community do this? Yes, but do they have the will ans/or stamina to do so?

The new “Blue Book” project would be daunting, surely, but if the UFO mystery is to be solved, it will have to be undertaken.