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The Suppression of UFO Technologies and Extraterrestrial Contact 349
accumulated pointing to the possible extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, the
CIA became increasingly nervous that other U.S. government agencies
might launch their own inquiries into the matter. Secrecy would be an
impossibility if everyone investigated UFOs, and in a matter of time,
details would leak to the media and the public.
In response to these concerns, the CIA began a process of maintaining
a tight rein over the investigations to ensure no public inquiries would
ever take place. To discredit the phenomenon, the CIA set up a panel of
experts whose job was to explain away UFOs.
The CIA convened on 14 January, 1953, a confab that became known
as the Robertson Panel, after its Chairman Dr. H. P. Robertson, then director
of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, and also a CIA employee.
The sequence of events leading directly to the Robertson Panel
involved a series of UFO sightings over the nation's capital in the summer
of 1952, sightings confirmed by military personnel, including radar operators
and scrambled interceptor pilots, and which themselves resulted in
the largest post-WWII military press conference to date. At the press conference
itself, the repeated radar sightings were put down to "temperature
inversions," and the attending Air Force officers made no mention of the
scrambled jet fighters.
Besides the esteemed Dr. Robertson, the Panel also included as members
physicist Dr. Luis Alvarez, later a Nobel Laureate, Dr. Samuel
Goudsmit, another physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories who
was an associate of Einstein's and had discovered electron spin, a former
University of Chicago astronomer and then deputy director of the Johns
Hopkins Operations Research office, Dr. Thornton Page, and finally Dr.
Lloyd Berkner, yet another physicist and one of Brookhaven's directors.
The Panel was addressed by a variety of CIA and Air Force personnel
who reviewed some twenty of the better UFO cases and showed two film
strips of alleged flying saucers, one of which purportedly portrayed
objects characterized as "self-luminous" by no less an authoritative source
than the Navy's Photograph Interpretation Laboratory which had spent
over 1,000 hours analyzing the particular movie film in question.
Although impressive evidence was presented by the panel, highlighted
by detailed reports documented by the Air Force, its recommendations
read like they were formulated before the panel even convened. The CIA
had already developed a cover story to cloak the real story: UFOs were to
be dismissed as just another scientific enigma, a Cold War datum, one that
might be cleverly manipulated by the enemy.
In short, the Robertson Panel ruled "that the evidence presented on
Unidentified Flying Objects shows no indication that these phenomena