The Condon Committee

The Condon Committee, formally the University of Colorado UFO Project, was the Air Force-funded scientific study of UFOs conducted from 1966 to 1968 under physicist Edward Condon. Its final report's conclusion, that further study was not justified, gave the Air Force the scientific cover to close Project Blue Book. Its interior contents have fueled critics ever since.

The 1966 Michigan "swamp gas" embarrassment and congressional hearings pushed the Air Force to commission an independent university study. Colorado accepted a roughly $500,000 contract, with Condon, a renowned and famously independent physicist, as director.

The project examined case files and investigated dozens of current sightings with field teams. Internally it was troubled: the 1968 "Low memo" controversy, in which coordinator Robert Low had written before the study that it could be expected to find nothing while appearing objective, led to firings, resignations, and a Look magazine exposé. The 1,485-page final report, released January 1969, opened with Condon's conclusion that 21 years of study had added nothing to science and that further extensive study could not be justified. The National Academy of Sciences endorsed it. Blue Book closed that December.

Condon directed; Low coordinated; staff scientists David Saunders and Norman Levine were fired in the memo affair. Critics James McDonald and J. Allen Hynek published detailed rebuttals.

Concluded 1969. The full report is freely available and remains among the most cited official scientific documents on the subject.

The report's own case studies did not support its summary: roughly 30 percent of the examined cases remained unexplained, including some described in the text with phrases like "unusual and puzzling." Critics from McDonald to the 1998 Sturrock Panel argued Condon's conclusions were written independently of his staff's findings. Defenders answer that unexplained does not mean inexplicable, and that the report's standard, no probative value for science, was met. The gap between the report's summary and its contents is now the standard teaching example in arguments about official studies.