REVIEW ARTICLE Ufology: What Have We Learned? - Society for ...

566 M. D. Swords
Fig. 17. Donald Menzel ready to go to war against James McDonald, while innocent bystander
(William Powell, a pilot) gets caught in the middle. (NICAP)
weakness in our society, which could be exploited by an enemy, and therefore
this belief must be quashed. Speaking of his friend Robertson, he said that
"Bob" had always been hostile to the idea of UFOs well before chairing
the panel "but perhaps we better not mention that point" in the book53.
SET1 enthusiasm ploughed forward but now the UFOs were flapping again.
Nineteen sixty-five and 1966 were dense UFO years and during them a very
young and naive SETIan made a blunder. In the spring 1966 meeting of the
American Astronautical Society, Carl Sagan, then of Harvard (no less), stole the
show by stating that spacemen "may have visited Earth thousands of times in
the past few billions of years" and, worse than that, "at least one of these visits
may have occurred in historical times."54 Hmm. Sort of sounds like UFOs. Some
of Sagan's colleagues thought so, too. People like Menzel and Condon remarked
about Sagan in letters: was he dependable, solid, in his thinking?55 Did he have
kookish tendencies like Allen Hynek or Jim McDonald, those renegades who
thought something important existed in the phenomenon? (Figure 17) Condon
wondered whether Sagan's softness on this was reason for excluding him
from the honor of belonging to the elite Cosmos Club in D.C., an honor he hoped
had already been denied to Allen Hynek. It took the headstrong young
Sagan a while to get completely into line but once he did, he blossomed into
the second most effective public scientist debunking UFOs (behind Menzel).
One wonders: did Cosmos parlay into Cosmos Club?
As the flap roared on, a major television network decided that it had to address
all this silliness. CBS, with the Face That Told the Truth, Walter Cronkite,
produced a UFO special: UFOs: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? It aired in May 1966
and, of course, featured Donald Menzel. Covertly, it also featured something
else. Somehow, CBS had chosen as scientific advisor to the program a man
named Thornton Page. This was the same Doctor Page, who was an intelligence
community scientist during the forties and fifties, and who had served on the
Robertson (CIA) Panel in 1953, as mentioned above (Figure 18). That panel had
made specific, media-strategic recommendations on how to make UFOs appear
empty of content, and even foolish. After the CBS broadcast, Page wrote to the