A study prepared for NASA’s Committee on Long-Range Studies by the Brookings Institution, delivered in late 1960 and transmitted to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in April 1961. Most of its 219 pages are about satellites, weather forecasting and the economics of space programmes. It is cited in the UAP literature for about two pages inside a section on the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
What it actually says
The passage notes that artefacts of another civilisation, if they exist, are most likely to be found on the Moon, Mars or Venus, and that such a discovery could come at any time. It then observes, from the anthropological record, that societies certain of their place in the universe have sometimes disintegrated on contact with unfamiliar societies holding different ideas, while those that survived did so by changing their values. It singles out scientists and engineers as the group whose position might be most destabilised, because their authority rests on a body of knowledge that a superior one would displace. And it lists, as questions that would need study, how such information might be presented to or withheld from the public, and what the consequences of each course would be.
What it does not say
It is not a recommendation to conceal anything, and it is not evidence that anything was concealed. The withholding question appears as an item on a research agenda that was never funded, in a report whose own framing is that nobody knows the answer. The report is nonetheless the earliest official document in which the destabilising effect of confirmation, independent of any contact’s content, is stated as a serious problem for a government to plan around, which is the same proposition The Three-Body Problem dramatises with aliens in it.
Connections
Condon Report · Robertson Panel · When Prophecy Fails · SETI · METI · The Three-Body Problem · UAP Disclosure Act 2023