How Project Blue Book Worked, Pt I

Jerry behind the scenes stuff everyone. Jerry sometimes has to get what's called room tone, which means she has to roll tape digitally and we have to be completely silent for a few moments. We get the tone of the room for I don't know, purposes of magic. And every time she's done that, we always have the urge to giggle or fart or be six year old. So she looks at us sternly the whole time during that five or six seconds of room. Man, it's so funny. I

don't know what that instat does. And that's just like we can't sit here for five seconds and not speak without cracking a joke. We've got a bit of the class clown in us, I think is what it is. I sure did still do. Oh yeah, Were you a class clown? Really? Yeah? But on the downland, Like I wouldn't fire out something for the whole class to hear unless I knew it was like comedy gold. But I would work my circle around me, you know. Yeah, you're a regional act. I was fairly disruptive, okay, but it

was always fun. So teachers liked me. But they were just like, just shut up though? Sometimes? Were your parents were educators so you knew where the line was? Right? Were you going over the line because you could get away with it? No? I mean they weren't teachers. I mean that's actually that's not true. My dad was the principle. But I didn't start real cutting up till high school. I got you. Why are we talking about this? I don't know. I'll tell you why, chuck, because it reminds

me of Henny Youngman. It just so happened to be around the peak of his career on June four seven. Did you fact check that? Okay, because then we're going to get a letter. Henny Youngman's career peak was in you morons, you do get paid during a government shutdown? Oh? Yeah? And are we going to correct that now or should we do it a listener mail, No, we might as well correct it now. Yeah, so I got it wrong

big time, and we heard from apparently everybody. Nine thousand of our million listeners are government employees who worked through the last shutdown, because all of them email in and said, hey, by the way, whether you worked or not, if you were furloughed, you were. You got back paid this time. But you we were right. It does take an act of Congress. That doesn't happen automatically. What does this take an Act of Congress? Yes, it does. So we got

that one wrong. I got that one wrong. Chuck went along with it for the went along for the usual. Yeah, sure, yeah, that sounds good. Josh, whatever you say, I want to get your back you know, I appreciate that. So anyway, um, back on j seven, it was a very important day because you can use this day to basically pinpoint the moment that America's just ongoing fascination with UFOs and by extension, aliens began. It did not exist basically before that time. Yeah.

Why do you think that is? Because I think a a skeptic and we're gonna talk a lot in this episode about skeptics and believers. For lack of a better word, Skeptics would say, like, while all of a sudden, that UFOs just start appearing, right, And I think there are some answers to that. Oh yeah, like I don't know, maybe they just found it or maybe they just decided to start poking around our airspace. Well, that presumes that there is actual like UFOs and extra, yeah they do.

You have another explanation for if there isn't a they, Well, maybe just um newspaper I mean, were there no like even newspaper reports pre I know all of it began on June ninety all right, Well then my answer is the aliens started their business then on that day, Okay, and I mean there would have to be a basically a day zero if that ever really did start somewhere? Yeah, why not seven? Who knows? They may have been zipping around with the dinosaurs maybe, but the dinosaurs didn't put

that on the news. Nope, did they see that. Well, they didn't preserve any of their own news reels. At the very least that's true for me. The explanation is mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, that kind of stuff. Alright, So on June there was a man named Kenneth Arnold. He was a pilot to private pilot, not a private in the army who was a pilot, private sector pilot. I think that really got across with the private pilot. Uh.

And he had a good reputation. He wasn't some uh he was known around town as a respectable business guy. And he was flying near Washington Mount Rainier and he was looking for down plane. I guess he was a search and rescue guy. Hey, I think he was just helping out maybe a similar pre civil air patrol. It was or right around the time that it started, Okay, but even still, I think he was just being like

a good samaritan. He had his own plane and was helping like and he saw and this is a quote, uh nine saucer like things flying like geese in a diagonal chain like line, and estimated the speed of these uh saucer geese to be twelve hundred miles per right, which really is pretty funny. Well, at the time he must have been going probably about fifty miles per hour

in his old little prop plane. UM. So part that was really saying something you wouldn't hardly be able to see it, I would think, so he he lodges this report and um, within just a few hours, this is what. I don't know how this happened, but within a few hours, the Associated Prescott wind of this. Yeah. The AP is a wire service, which means like they do the reporting and they send it out to newspapers for syndication, and newspapers just print what the AP wrote all over the country.

So the AP picking it up made it national news almost the same day, basically that this man had seen something. And in this AP report, the writer coined the term flying saucers. Yeah, because Kenneth Arnold had called them saucer like things that we're flying, and he went, let me just rearrange this in a way that's a little more gravy flying what flying? What he saw a saucer geese like goscer geese. Flying saucers worked, And it was a big deal, and all of a sudden, everyone starts seeing, Um,

we didn't call him UFOs yet. Just keep your pants on, we'll get there flying saucers, flying saucers or flying discs. Right. There was even in the San Francisco Chronicle headline that said flying saucer seen in most states. Now, so that headline was printed on July seven. Kenneth Arnold saw his sighting on June, a couple of weeks at tops and within that time, like so many reports happen that basically every state had I had a report of a flying saucer.

Now pretty amazing. It was like a floodgate opened. Yeah, which if you're in the United States Air Force at the time, is problematic because they were in charge of security for for anything not on the ground in the United States. Yeah, the air space. Yeah, I guess I could count the sea and that's the Navy. So yeah, I was trying to say it in a more clever way, but I think they're there, Yeah, you're airspace, and like, what are we gonna do here? Uh? Is this a

threat to America? Like do we need to start legitimately investigating this stuff? Right after Pearl Harbor, the Cold War is starting to heat up a little bit and people are freaked out and we need to see what's going

on at least. Yeah, people were a little jittery, yeah over that in that decade in particular, So the Air Force does decide that it needs to do something, um, especially at the behest of a guy named Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, who was the commander of Air Material Command, and he wrote a memo titled Flying Discs, and he basically said, we need to figure out what is the deal with all this because these reports that are coming in are describing things that shouldn't be possible. So let's

look into this. And he had enough clout that a project, an Air Force project was created named Projects Sign. Yeah. This is the first of what will be several projects which culminated in you know, I think the final one was just shut down like six or seven years ago, like officially well twelve. I don't know if it's technically related to SIGN, but it followed in the mean, I mean, just projects investigating UFOs by the US government. Yes, like

officially designated investigations. Yeah, that the one you're referring to was supposedly shut down in two twelve, but some claim it was never really shut down, as it's usually the case. So this project Signed technically was originally called Projects Saucer. Not bad, It's okay. I like projects Signed cooler or more? It sounds cooler. Um, yeah, don't you think it sounds very mysterious? Well, yeah, I'll give you that. What is it related to it's not as good as the next one,

but we'll look at that. Okay. So Projects Signed is associated with right Patterson Air Force Base. It's assigned to it. The project is run out of right Field at the time, outside of Dayton. And if you're a u fologist, you would say, well, of course it's right Patterson. That's where they reverse engineer all the alien technology. So of course that's where they would investigate it. And they actually do

reverse engineer technology at right Patterson Air Force Base. Then they have since like World War One when a down German biplane was captured and they took it to Dayton and said, figure out how this works. That's a really interesting job. And project sure, I think reverse engineering stuff because it's basically copying. I mean I get why they call it reverse engineering because you're starting at the end

and going backwards. But just to be handed like here is an enemy, um whatever, it could be a weaponto yeah whatever, and say, just figure out how it works so we can build one if we want to, or if it's not worth our time, then at least we know how it works exactly, or we can come up with measures to counteract it, or yeah, how can we destroy this or copy this? What kind of potatoes are they using in there? Those new potatoes, they'll put a

hole right through you new potato caboose? Oh yeah, that man? Was that a real band? Or when you made up? I can't remember it was real. It's like a little hipie shake Ban's right. So, uh, the long and short of it is anytime right. Patterson has mentioned that's when the you know, who's the one guy that everyone the meme always posts Aliens man? The other guy from Ancient Aliens? Is that what it was from which I knew his name? Do you remember? That's one of the first things that

Aaron Cooper did of us? Oh really was us? Is the Ancient Aliens guy? One of the first stuff you should know? Meme copies after Van Nostran's era ended. After Van Nostran's Reign of Terror, Cooper picked up the thread, so it might say bean Nostrans continues today his reign of terror. Yeah, just not photoshop based. So um yeah, if it's right, Patterson, then people are gonna think there's

something going on there. And like you said, there was a lot going on there, including very secret projects that are still going on there. I supposedly that's where they took the Roswell UH flying saucer, which also happened in n A lot of people connect those dots, but it apparently Roswell and the crash and aliens didn't really become

part of like cultural consciousness until the eighties. UM. Anyway, So and so Project Signs going on, and in a year after or the following year after Kenneth Arnold first had a sighting UM, they released a document called the

Estimate of the Situation. And this is these are Air Force personnel working on Project Signs, okay, and they get together and they say, you know what, UM, we don't think that based on some of these these UM, these sightings and in particular what we consider very credible witnesses describing very incredible things, that that they have any kind of origin in US or even USSR technology, and there's

a possibility that these are extraterrestrial in origin. And that was the basis of this estimate of the situation that they handed off to UH Air Force, the Air Force Brass, and the Air Force Brass said, are you out of your mind? So in the end, the report basically said we can neither confirm nor deny the very famous line that everyone uses these days, which basically means there's something

going on. Yes, but remember we we found the place where that first was cool the Glomar Explorer, right, and that wasn't until the sixties. So I think this is somebody using an anachronism here. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it necessarily said that in the report, but that was the upshot. Basically they just said it with different words back then. So, um, here's the deal. Though, there were a lot of people that worked on this thing

that uh would have probably confirmed. It was kind of split between people like, maybe there's something going on here and people that just didn't think so and probably didn't want to deal with it. Yeah. I didn't have a sense of just how evenly split it was, but there were definitely people working on the projects who said they're extraterrestrial in origin and other people who said, no, there's we just don't understand it. The Air Force brass like

I said, said, are you guys crazy? You actually made this document and got their hands on all the copies, destroyed them all And as a matter of fact, the Air Force has always denied that the estimate of the situation ever existed, and that any understanding that it did exist came from people who did work on Project sign who said, no, this, this did exist, and this is

what it said, and this is the reaction it got. Yeah, it's kind of hard not to like because we're both fairly skeptical, but it's hard not to go down that conspiracy trail a little bit. Yeah, when you hear stuff like that report never existed and people that worked on it like, no, it totally existed, and here's what it said, here's what it was called. And you know, they just basically incenterate the thing. You had a copy, I saw you made the little flower doodles on it. It's hard

enough to go down that road, it really is. And that's kind of part of the problem with all this is because there's this um you know, this huge, massive public um viewing of all of this stuff, reports, suggestions, it becomes a thing, and at the same time, as we'll see, the government is simultaneously investigating it and then denying it, and it created kind of a weird headlock on on the nation's psyche. Yeah, so there was one um sighting in Project Signs book and report that doesn't

exist that most everyone was like pretty impressed by. And that was the uh chills or chillis Childs why did witted witted? I'm going with childs witted the child's witted UFO encounter. And that was an Alabama in July of And this is the beginning of what you will see as a recurring thing where it's not you know, the drunk farmer in the field or the college students students partying, you know in a cul de sac. It's like military pilots or airline pilots, like people that are trained to

understand aviation and know what doesn't look right. Uh. And this one was to Eastern Airlines pilots. Uh. They were flying a d C three and they said they nearly collided with um. And here's the quote a strange torpedo shape plying object that looked like quote one of those

fantastic flash Gordon rocket ships in the funny papers. It didn't really help the legitimacy, but the fact that these guys described it, that they were so bread at the time, that they were both trained commercial pilots, it really did impress a lot of people working on sign and it did kind of give them this confidence that there may be something going on that we don't understand here and

we need to investigate this. Right But for the Air Forces part General hoyit Vandenburg said no physical evidence, no case exactly, and and he's the one who allegedly ordered all of the copies of the estimate destroyed, and he also basically ordered from on high, look, all of this can be explained something them how, some way, using our

current understanding of science, go make that happen. It's what came to be known as the conventional explanation paradigm, which I put this together long enough ago now that I can't remember if that's an actual thing or if I coin that. Oh the EP. Yes, it sounds official to me. It does when you say it that way. But I also have a very dry style, so it's entirely possible

I came up with that. But that is there are three things, basically three causes of why somebody might think they have seen a alien ship under the c EP under the EP mass hysteria and hallucination, which is what you think, dogs and cats, hoax, which is that's super easy to believe that someone Plenty of those have happened. You remember crop circles. Uh. And then misinterpretation of known objects, which is a very big bucket that you can toss

things into if you're the military. Yeah, because there's a lot of weather phenomenon or celestial phenomenon and you can just make stuff up and say they were looking at this rubber bands? What it was rubber bands? How are you going to prove otherwise? You'll note, though, in all three of those explanations, there are none of them say extraterrestrials or even secret unknown technology, right, because that's not conventional or an explanation. While it is an explanation, but

it's not conventional, but it doesn't fit the paradigm. It does not Uh. And then they actually worked with the Saturday Evening post Um which everybody was reading at the time, and they did a two part article which debunked flying saucers. And this was sort of the beginning of um kind of like a not kind of like very much a pr campaign to debunk flying saucers. Should you take a break? I think we should chuck. We've reached the break part.

All right, We'll move on to Project Grudge right after this. Okay, So here's the thing though, the Air Force, even if they really genuinely were like, no, man, there's no such thing as aliens. Whatever this is, it's just it's just Americans being freaked out about the Cold War. Okay, let's just call it that. This is the Air Force brass talking.

I'm doing my best impression of them. Um. They still needed to investigate him, because the Air Force is charged with protecting US airspace and there are reports coming in on a daily basis from all over the country of unidentified objects flying saucers flying through American airspace. So they

still needed to investigate this. But the Air Force decided they could investigate it on their own terms, and so Projects sign was dissolved and replaced by what this is your favorite name for Project Grudge, which is named so exactly why, you think, because they didn't want to be messing with this stuff, they should have called it Project Uh are you freaking kidding me? Are you joking right now? I gotta do what do you hear yourself? Um? Yeah, that was a sort of That was the attitude in

the Air Force at the time. You didn't want to get assigned. There might have been like one person that was super into it. I think they were a handful, but generally you didn't go into the Air Force to do this, and you were probably irked if you were assigned this duty. Yeah. I got the impression that this was something like being stationed in Greenland or Siberia or Alaska or something like that. Probably not Siberia. That Greenland's nice. No,

it's not. Alaska's lovely, okay, depending on all right, uninhabited Canada, Oh, okay, can it is great? Anyway, I got the impresson this is like a backwater assignment where if you ticked off your your commanding officer, that's they would put you on Project Oh you should have said South Georgia. Okay, yes, the worst place in the world. So uh yeah. You call this the Dark Ages of Air Force UFO investigation because Project Grudge was um the basic tenant there was.

We're here to debunk these claims, not so much investigate, but just a debunk. Right, Not only do these have some sort of conventional explanation, even when they seem like we don't they don't, We're still going to give them a conventional explanation because that's it. Because these are not extraterrestrials and we're sick of this s word. Yes, that's

what the Air Force said, that's right. Uh. And one of the people they hired as a civilian scientist consultant was a man named very important figure in this whole story, j Allen Heinek from the Ohio State University. You did that, huh? And he is a prominent astronomer. Does that make you mad a little bit? I'm not sure why either, but

it does. Uh. He was a prominent astronomer and he was recruited specifically to be chief of debunker And that's how we saw his role for sure too, especially initially, so he was a UFO skeptic UM to him, he really kind of fell in line with that mentality that everything could be explained as a hoax or a misunderstanding or a misidentification. UM. But he was also a scientist

in his you know core. Yeah, he was a very well respected astronomer, and he believed that this should still be investigated, especially cases where somebody who was like a trained pilot or an astronomer or a meteorologist or somebody had seen something um and and reported it and that it seemed incredible. Those incredible sightings by incredible people that was kind of the confounding thread that wound through these

decades of investigation of UFOs. Yeah, and the other thing too that you gotta remember about Heineck was he was very much the face of this debunking and uh, it's a role that he would grow to loathe over the years, to say the least, because we'll get to some of the more ridiculous explanations. He was the one that had to pare it the stuff out. Yeah, you know, they'd shove him out there, would be like, I don't know, and then all of a sudden realized there were cameras

in his face and he'd say, yo, everyone. That's what he was famous for, was that his intro linue. That's how it started every press conference. So one of his first efforts here and this was um and maybe his most famous this was the case of Captain Thomas Mantel. He was an Air Force pilot who died when his P fifty one Mustang went down while he was chasing a UFO. That sounds like an Air Force pilot and a pet Mustang. That's what you would do. Let me go after that thing. Sure, I want to, I want

to see what it's like, that's what Maverick would do. Yeah, I guess. So are you excited about that movie? I know? No, No, did you see the trailer? No, I'm gonna show it to you. It has Tom Cruise d aged in it. They should have just gone with that, So you are you excited about it? Listen? Man? I like top Gun. I was not some like. I didn't think I was some big nut for top Gun. But when I saw that trailer, it gave me a little bit of the fields for sure. Yeah, man, I was like, why am

I so excited about this? Wow? Okay, well maybe I'll give it. I guess on the child of the eighties. But when I saw him on that that Ninja motorcycle or whatever, riding around with his helmet on that music, who is top Gun? Now? Well? I think the deal is now he comes back, and now there's a brash young kid. Right, Who's the bresh young kid? Is a Christian Navarro? I don't think so. I predicted it would be,

and I don't think I'm right. Well, he would have been better than whoever they got, is what I'm saying, because he's a friend of the show and the other guy is probably not of course, although if it turns out he is, then it would be an even match. That's right. That's why we cast our a lot behind people who listen to they're the only respectable people, all right.

At any rate, I will go see this. I will to my dying day not see the remake of Red Dawn, despite at least a friend of the show, if not a former friend of the show, UM producing that film. Oh luke, Yes, yeah, he says it stinks to I'm not sure you're allowed to say that. You might want to email him first, Okay, okay, so okay, Heineck the P fifty one goes down and Hi Hiinich says, you know what, he may have been pursuing and chasing Venus

and they you know, that's a planet. Yeah so maybe uh and it was daytime and you can't see Venus in the daytime. He's like, yeah, I'm just gonna stick with Venus. I'm gonna stick with Venus. Goodbye. And there were That was just one explanation. There were other ones. Obviously. The weather bloom thing has always been a big one. UM conventional aircraft that you just you know, you saw it in the wrong light. Maybe, Yeah, So so you know,

like you watched X files and everything. Sure, Okay, do you remember how like this kind of like agitated Molder would get and he'd start talking really fast. He would just be talking about all the ridiculous explanations that I've been given for UFOs. This is where they actually started, yeah, with j Allen Heineck giving these public explanations that over the years is we'll see really stretch credibility, reason, logic, common sense and became a just kind of a a

pr problem for the Air Force. Yeah, because it might have been nothing or something explainable, but to just brush it under the rug as X or Y, like hey it's venus. It's like it that makes them do nothing but look bad, like they're not even taking it seriously, right right exactly. And I think in the Air Forces defense or from the position they were coming from, they didn't think the American public could handle and you know, oh sure just by saying like, oh, I don't know

what it was. You know, it wasn't a UFO, everybody, it wasn't an alien, it wasn't the Russians, but we just we can't say what it was. They were not prepared to just go out there and do that. Yeah, and again in their defense, I think America may have proven them right. They would have just been like, I knew it, it's aliens, and yeah, well they didn't want that. So they didn't want that kind of hysteria getting whipped up, which is why they explained everything, no matter how ridiculous

it was. That's right. So, um, this happened, more and more and more, more sightings would come in. Air force would trot Heinek out there again with his hello, good bye and in between a bunch of bs. Basically, yeah, everything from balloons, planets, meteor's optical illusions, solar reflections, large

hailstones is one that really got everybody. Um. But as as far as the air forces like going out there and just explaining everything in the actual project, people are saying like, there's some there's some out there that we just don't understand. There's something some core of this phenomenon. Yes, a lot of it is probably mass ysteria. Yes, a lot of his misidentification. But there are again credible witnesses who are giving these reports and we just can't quite

explain these. Yeah, there was one in particular in September of ninety one that really kind of brought things to a head. This was in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and these were I mean, there were pilots, there were radar operators. Um, they observed fast moving, highly maneuverable disc shaped aircraft. And

this is something you're gonna see again and again and again. Uh. They're they're always super fast and can do things that they've never seen aircraft do, like start and stop like on a dime, and turn and do these weird things that like are inexplicable for like really experienced pilots witnessing this stuff, or traveler even just an It's like this is there's not anything that at this time was supposed to be able to do that, right, And so Project Grudge,

the personnel there had to investigate all the stuff and the chain of command basically was to report it to Major or Well. The man in charge was Major General Charles Cabell. He was ahead of Air Force Intelligence at the Pentagon. Yeah, and because this was these were military witnesses, it was a military incident, he wanted this directly to him, that's right. So there was one a Grudge investigator, Lieutenant

Jerry Cummings, not Jerry sitting next to us. She's never been in the air for hush, as far as I know what she's been telling me otherwise for years. Oh yeah, she's a big time impostor if she hasn't been in the Air Force. So he actually believed that they were quote intelligently controlled what they investigated. He thought, he's basically using code for aliens man, right, like the guy from

Ancient Alien exactly. So here's the thing that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings, who who headed up this project for grudge, he was um, he was a little He was on the side of people who were like, no, this is being just swept under the rug. It's not being seriously investigated. And he actually griped about it to the head of Air Force Intelligence, Um Cable, that guy Cable, right, like Cabal Cable, Cabell, Cabell, Okay, and Cabell was like, what you guys aren't actually investigating

this stuff. This is all just a pr campaign and uh he was told affirmative, sir, affirmative, and he went a little nuts. Oh that's what happened. Okay. It wasn't quite clear on what made it. I didn't write it very well. Okay, So he said, Okay, this is ridiculous that we're not actually investigating it. That's going to change. So he had enough cloud that he got Grudge dissolved. Oh,

I thought he didn't like Grudge. He didn't like the way that Grudge was conducting this investigation, which is to say, not at all this makes more sense. And he instead said, we need to do something else. We need to revamp this whole project. We're gonna create We're gonna dissolve Grudge, create a new project. We're gonna call it Project blue Book because at the time, college exams were given in

these standardized blue test books. And he said that we need to approach this with all the seriousness of a test in college. We're gonna call this Project blue Book. And um, we're going to get a new guy to head it up, a guy named Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, And he could not have found a better guy to to head Project blue Book. All right, let's take another break, and we should also announce this is a two parter. I don't think we said that at the onset. Well,

that was gonna be the big cliffhanger, Oh, was it? Yeah, it was gonna be like the bicycle repair episode of different Strokes where no one collaps. Everybody just sits there in stunned silent. Well we can still do that, okay, alright, alright. So Project blue Book in the special two part episode. This is the second half of part one. Oh my god, you has confused me so bad. This was the new jam after Project Grudge. And you mentioned Edward Captain Edward J.

Repel or is it repelled? I've been calling them ruppled. Oh really, yeah, your sounds a little more regal. So let's go with repelled. Okay. Oh man, do people get sick of this? I can't believe they don't, but they don't seem to. Our numbers are steady, if not still growing. I imagine that we lose point five percent of listeners of a pronunciation alone. Oh, probably more than that. We're lovable and almost any other way. So blue Book is happening,

and under the command of Repelled. It is the Salad Days of official Military UFO investigation. I'm glad you use salad days. Have you ever seen the moning Python Salad Days? Sketch cheese? I don't know wherever they're playing like tennis in the late Victorian era, and like all of a sudden, it just turns into this bizarre blood bath. People like lose arms and sounds, head falls off. There's just blood everywhere. I just watch it again, Okay, okay, anytime I hear

salad days, that's what I think. Money Python, They're so great. So the objective, the objective, cheez. The objectives of Blue Book were one, determine whether UFOs are a threat to US security, because that's the big deal. That's why the military's involved. It's not just like, you know, we just gotta like calm people's nerves. Like like we said earlier, they really had to do this because they can't if

Independence Day happened. They can't be the ones who are like, oh, we we quit investigating this stuff because we thought it was just movies and science fiction. Yeah, yeah, that's there. They don't want to investigate this, but they have to a security concern just in case, and at the very least, the Air Force has to be showing the country that they're investigating, that they're on top of any security concerns like that. That's right. So that was the first objective.

Number two was and this makes sense as well, um to determine if they possess they meaning the Aliens. I guess any unique scientific information or advanced technology we could use. Yeah, and it didn't necessarily have to be Aliens. It could have been the Soviets too. I think that was probably the largest suspicion among people who said, no, this is real. Not necessarily that it's aliens. But maybe the Soviets are

way way further ahead than than we think they are. Yeah, like maybe they have some advanced by plane in US. You know, I don't want to spoil anything, but we had good reason to believe that might be going on, right, I know what you mean. I hope no one else does so. Uh, you can thank Mr Repelled or Captain Repelled by creating the term UFO. Yeah, he was like flying saucer, flying disc. Those are and and um disc geese who said, who even came up with that? Um?

Those are totally Unscientifically, we need something that just kind of resets things and says this is a scientific investigation, and it worked. I mean, if you it's easy to thank UFO. Now sounds so like goofy and unscientific, but when you break down the words, it's it's the classification that really worked at the time. It's just kind of go on, it's gone on to feel like something else and meaning, oh yeah, it's definitely got a lot of cultural baggage around it now, but at the time, yeah,

it was adia object exactly. And one of the other benefits of creating this new term was that they are also allowed to kind of redefine it, and they defined it really broadly as any aerial object which the observer is unable to identify, which is I mean, that's a really broad definition. And it also puts the onus for figuring out what that object was on the investigator. It's like basically saying, somebody saw something, they don't know what it is. Here's the description, go figure it out. Yeah.

And to his credit, he was like, let's get a database on a computer. And everyone said, what's a computer. He said, it's right here inside this warehouse, right, the warehouses the computer that's right, plug it in. Uh. And he he was gonna apply statistical methods to really try and figure something out. Drew up these questionnaires for people. Write a streamline questionnaire. Yeah, stuff like a draw picture that will show the shape of the object. Um, what

was the condition of the sky. Did it suddenly speed up, a rush away? Did it change shape? Did it flicker? Did it throb? Did it pulse? Sate? Never moment? This is creepy And they shoved the question in air back across the table. But the UM and that the US Air Force Space basically designated a special officer to collect all these reports. Every base had one, every single base, and they all had to send those two right Patterson,

right exactly. So UM they were taking this like really scientific approach that was saying like, we don't know what this is, but we're going to apply science to it, and we're going to get to the bottom of it. And as a result, they said, okay, because this definition for unidentified flying object is so wide, because it's up to us to investigate, we're gonna come up with three categories that these can possibly be placed into. There is identified where we figured it out. It was a meteor,

it was a weather balloon. The person was drunk on corn whiskey, who knows. Um, there is insufficient data, were like, I don't know, it's just this thing that flew by. He'd say, okay, that's an insufficient data one. And then the last one the most famous one is unidentified, where no matter what UM they try during this investigation, they have enough data, they have a good enough description, but they can't correlate it with any known object phenomenon technology.

And as a result, because of this open mindedness led by Captain Repelt, that there was a UM unidentified rate in Project Blue Books Investigation UM during his tenure. That's right, reports, we're misidentification of known things. Nine, we're insufficient information. I guess insufficient data and then known category uh one and a half percent were crackpots, were probable hoaxes, but basically miscellaneous. And then I think two. Yeah, I'm sorry, unknown, unknown

or unidentified. And to this day, the official number of unidentified flying objects sightings that remained unidentified unexplained is seven and one. That's a magic number. Yeah, there are dudes out there with that tattooed on the back of their neck. Probably I want to believe. Is that the end of

part one? I think, so Chuck is pretty good spot. Yeah, so, as is tradition with two parters, We're not gonna do a listener mail, but we'll do a call out out for help with you guys, like we do every now and then so it really helps us out if you guys leave ratings and reviews on iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice and tell a friend a co worker that you listen to Stuff you Should Know and you get a lot out of it, and that stuff really is what made the show popular to begin with. Yeah,

and we appreciate the continued support. Yeah, we try not to ask much. A couple of times a year. Maybe, yeah, please we have another review? Yes, okay, Well, if you want to get in touch of this in the meantime while you wait around for part two, you can go to Stuff you Should Know dot com and follow us on social and as always, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff

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