Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, the Air Force-funded review carried out at the University of Colorado under the physicist Edward U. Condon between 1966 and 1968, and the document on which Project Blue Book was closed.
What it concluded and what it contained
Condon’s own summary held that nothing of scientific value had come from twenty-one years of UFO study and that further work was unlikely to be justified; the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the methodology, and the Air Force announced Blue Book’s termination on 17 December 1969. The body of the report is less tidy than its summary: roughly a third of the cases it examined were left unexplained, among them the radar-visual analysis of Bentwaters-Lakenheath 1956 by the physicist Gordon Thayer, who called it a probable mechanical device of unknown origin. J. Allen Hynek and James McDonald both attacked the gap between the conclusions and the case work.
The internal problem
The study’s credibility question is not its conclusion but the Low Memo 1966, written by the project’s own coordinator before the work began, which proposed presenting the project as objective to the public while signalling to the scientific community that it expected to find nothing. The memo leaked in 1968 and two staff members were dismissed over it.
Where it stands
It is the reason the American government had no UFO programme between 1969 and the 2000s, and it is cited on both sides: as the scientific closure of the question, and as the clearest example of a review whose framing preceded its evidence.
Connections
Project Blue Book · Low Memo 1966 · J. Allen Hynek · Bentwaters-Lakenheath 1956 · Committee to Review Project Blue Book · Robertson Panel · Project Blue Book Special Report 14 · In Plain Sight · Sturrock Panel 1997