Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

similar to the American one. The Russians made some moves toward the creation of a committeebut cleverly awaited the developments in the United States before funding it and giving it an officialstamp of approval. In Boulder, Colorado, a group was finally being assembled with much fanfare,headed by Dr. Condon, a prestigious physicist close to retirement. The group had recieved asizeable grant to ponder ufology, and its report was due in 1969. It would prove to be negative.Destroying the DataIn November 1966, when the Condon committee started gathering testimony from people who haddone research into UFO cases, Dr. Hynek and I were the first scientists asked to come to Boulder tobrief the group. We soon noticed that one of the administrators, Bob Low, was clearly the keydecision maker on the team, although he had no science degree and seemed to have little interest inthe matter. Yet there was a certain euphoric feeling in the room, a sense of embarking on a uniqueadventure. There was little passion in the press now; the Michigan swamp gas crisis had beenlargely forgotten. The problem was in the hands of the scientists, and it had become as dull as anyventure that is in the process of being rationalized away by the academic mill. If the journey to themoon can be turned into the exasperating bore that modern technology has generated, there is noreason to expect that the same lack of interest will not settle over the UFO mystery once it falls intothe hands of Big Science! (The first astronauts to die in orbit will probably die of ennui when theyrun out of buttons to push, digits to read out, and jokes with Houston about the football scores.)As early as February 1967, members of the Condon committee were privately approaching theirscientific colleagues on other campuses, asking them how they would react if the committee's finalreport to the Air Force were to recommend closing down Project Blue Book. Not surprisingly, a fewmonths later the work of the committee had come to a standstill. Field investigations werenonexistent. Questionnaires were sent out to witnesses, but only one assistant was aviable to encodethe results for the computer file, where the bulk of the information was provided by the threethousand punched cards I had turned over to the committee.A minority faction of the group caused a crisis when it rebelled. After a series of incidents that Dr.Dave Saunders documented in his book, UFOs? Yes!, the team split into two factions. An earlyrestricted memorandum discovered and published by the minority group provided evidence that theCondon committee had never intended to look seriously into the UFO problem. Publication of thisdocument so outraged Condon that he fired the minority group and ran the project without anyfurther consideration of the possible reality of the phenomenon.The files of the committee were eventually destroyed. One would think that they belonged to thescientific fraternity or to the public domain, since American taxpayers paid for the "research." Notso. When the project wrote its report the files were locked up by the University of Colorado inBoulder. They were later transferred to a private home and were burned shortly thereafter.The Second Coverup: Convenient ExplanationsThe little town of Carteret lies on the western coast of Normandy, France, about twenty miles fromCherbourg. It is situated directly to the north of wonderful Mont-Saint-Michel, a monastery that, aslegend goes, was built by the devil. On December 2, 1973, a very strange thing happened on thebeach at Carteret. Two fishermen, Mr. G. Jean, forty-four, and his son Noel, eighteen, got up at 5:00A.M. to retrieve their nets at low tide. When they arrived on the beach half an hour later, they saw avery bright object directly over the area where their nets had been spread. They walked toward ituntil they estimated they were about 150 yards away, and it appeared as an intense yellow"window," eight feet long and five feet high, emitting a cone-like beam directed toward the ground.The two fishermen were afraid and decided not to go closer. They tried to work without thinkingabout the object, but then it changed suddenly: the yellow light was turned off. Over the area where