Peter Jennings investigating UFOs in American History

An interesting video from ABC's Peter Jennings broadcast on February 24, 2005 .
Starting with the 1947 UFO sighting by Kenneth Arnold the video also covers Ufo sightings reports in Air Force's Project Bluebook ,Jennings shows that it was a public relations effort to get UFOs out of the newspapers by saying that UFOs were nothing more than weather balloons, rare atmospheric conditions, a star on the horizon, or whatever it took.
Bluebook's chief scientist Dr. Allen Hynek who was once skeptical, but after more than 20 years and 12,000 UFO investigations, became a believer. Dr. Hynek spent the rest of his life investigating and calling for serious scientific inquiry into the UFO phenomenon but most of his fellow scientists rejected his opinions.
video.google.com...#

reply to post by gortex


Remember, the government "is no longer in the UFO business"
UFO skeptics always forget about the Project BlueBook PR campaign, and how Hynek himself was a respected scientist who became a believer.

reply to post by gortex

Looks great.

Google Video Link

reply to post by gortex


Gortex -great video!

Hadn't seen many of those pilot interviews before and theres some very interesting case histories on there - thanks for posting that one.

Cheers.

Originally posted by WhiteDevil013
Remember, the government "is no longer in the UFO business"
UFO skeptics always forget about the Project BlueBook PR campaign, and how Hynek himself was a respected scientist who became a believer.

Heres an interesting statement from the man himself.

"Before I began my association with the US Air Force, I had
joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw
at the "psychological postwar craze" for flying saucers
that seemed to be sweeping the country and at the naivete
and gullibility of our fellow human beings who were being
taken in by such obvious "nonsense." It was almost in a
sense of sport that I accepted the invitation to have a
look at the flying saucer reports....."

"I had started out as an outright 'debunker,' taking
great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling
cases. I was the arch enemy of those 'flying saucer
groups and enthusiasts' who very dearly wanted UFOs to be
interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came
almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book
personnel; they were all "crackpots and visionaries.'"


"Now, however, documentation which puts the UFO-
U.S. government controversy in quite a new light has
become available. The authors have made revealing use of
documents released through the mechanism of the Freedom
of Information Act and other data which have been made
available to them, often through private sources, which
show that the CIA and NSA protestations of innocence and
lack of interest in UFOs are nothing short of
prevarication."

"The reader must judge for himself or herself just
how far these implications extend, but certainly no one
can deny any longer that various intelligence agencies of
our government were long cognizant of UFOs and the global
extent of this phenomenon. Official dispatches from our
embassies and air bases in other countries to these
agencies, to the State Department, and even, on occasion,
to the White House, bear incontrovertible witness to
this."

"For the government to continue to maintain that
UFOs are nonexistent in the face of the documents already
released and of other cogent evidence presented in this
book is puerile and in a sense an insult to the American
people."


Dr J Allen Hynek, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University and scientific consultant for Air Force investigations of UFOs from 1948 until 1969 (Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book).

Link

Source from the segment, from a picture of a newspaper in 1947.

"Weird Flying Saucers Seen Over 8 States - Chicago, July 3rd - Flying saucers, mystery missiles of the sky, are coming from all directions"

I couldn't find the article, it would be nice to have the whole thing.