An American obsession with the UFO phenomenon was under way. within the hot summer of 1952 a provocative series of radar and visual sightings occurred near National Airport in Washington, D.C. Although these events were attributed to temperature inversions within the air over the town , not everyone was convinced by this explanation. Meanwhile, the amount of UFO reports had climbed to a record high. This led the Central intelligence to prompt the U.S. government to determine an expert panel of scientists to research the phenomena. The panel was headed by H.P. Robertson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and included other physicists, an astronomer, and a rocket scientist . The Robertson Panel met for 3 days in 1953 and interviewed military officers and therefore the head of Project Blue Book. They also reviewed films and pictures of UFOs. Their conclusions were that 90 percent of the sightings might be easily attributed to astronomical and meteorologic phenomena (e.g., bright planets and stars, meteors, auroras, ion clouds) or to such earthly objects as aircraft, balloons, birds, and searchlights, there was no obvious security threat, and there was no evidence to support the ETH. Parts of the panel’s report were kept classified until 1979, and this long period of secrecy helped fuel suspicions of a government cover-up.
A second committee was found out in 1966 at the request of the Air Force to review the foremost interesting material gathered by Project Blue Book. Two years later this committee, which made an in depth study of 59 UFO sightings, released its results as Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects—also referred to as the Condon Report, named for Edward U. Condon, the physicist who headed the investigation. The Condon Report was reviewed by a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences. a complete of 37 scientists wrote chapters or parts of chapters for the report, which covered investigations of the 59 UFO sightings intimately . just like the Robertson Panel, the committee concluded that there was no evidence of anything aside from commonplace phenomena within the reports which UFOs didn’t warrant further investigation. This, along side a decline in sighting activity, led to the dismantling of Project Blue Book in 1969.
