Negative ResponsesDespite the largely positive response to the Condon Report’s conclusions, it has seen a number of critics disputing it in one way or another; some of these are noted below.
Several observers have criticised the report as a sloppy work: Jacobs describes the report as "a rather unorganized compilation of independent articles on disparate subjects, a minority of which dealt with UFOs."(Jacobs, 240) Hynek agrees with this characterisation, he argues that the report is "a voluminous, rambling, poorly organized report ... considerably less than half of which was addressed to the investigation of UFO reports." (Hynek, 192) Hynek also contended that beyond Condon's introduction, "the rest of the lengthy report defies succinct description. It is a loose compilation of partly related subjects, each by a different author." (Hynek, 193) Swords contends that "To those of us who have opened it (the Condon Report), it has a peculiar structure, almost audibly saying, 'don't try to read me'. Paranoia aside, this probably is not deliberate. Reading the primary documents of the project indicates very clearly that the organization's chaos and personnel dislocations that afflicted it made the creation of a smooth document impossible."
In the April 14, 1969 issue of Scientific Research, Robert L. M. Baker, Jr. wrote that rather than settling the issue, the Condon Committee’s report "seems to justify scientific investigation along many general and specialized frontiers." [4]
In the December, 1969 issue of Physics Today, Condon Committee consultant Gerald Rothberg wrote that he had thoroughly investigated about 100 UFO cases; three of four of these had left him puzzled. He thought that this "residue of unexplained reports" indicated a "legitimate scientific controversy." (Clark, 604)
In the November, 1970 issue of Astronautics and Aeronautics, The American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics published their review of the Condon Report. The AIAA subcommittee appreciated the difficulty of the undertaking, and generally agreed with Condon's suggestion that little of value had been uncovered by scientific UFO studies, but had some criticism for the Condon Report, stating that the AIAA "did not find a basis in the report for his (Condon's) prediction that nothing of scientific value will come of further studies." [5]
Of the Condon Report’s 56 case studies, 30--whether termed "probable" "possible” or "suspected" hoaxes, misidentifications or the like--are classified as unknown. In a review published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hynek noted that the percentage of unknowns (nearly 50%) in the Condon report was well above the unknowns in Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, the projects which "led to the Condon investigation in the first place." (Clark, 603) Hynek, McDonald and others would argue that some of the solved cases were solved more by strained presumption than detailed dissection of the evidence presented. A few of the unknowns were judged by the Committee’s members to be most perplexing, yet Condon made no mention of these conclusions in his summaries.
Critics often charge that Condon's summaries are inacurate or misleading. For example, Gordon David Thayer was the Committee’s consultant on the 35 radar-visual cases. Thayer concluded that 19 of 35 cases were almost certainly due to "anomalous propagation": so called "radar ghosts" that can be generated by fog, clouds, birds, insect swarms or the like, yet are suggestive on the radar screen of a solid object. Though Thayer offered anomalous propagation as an explanation for just over 50% of the cases he studied, Condon suggested that anomalous propagation was responsible for all the radar cases.
The case studies feature scattered statements which seem to suggest that at least some of the Committee regarded a few of the UFO reports as genuinely anomalous, yet in his summaries, Condon makes no mention of these conclusions. Jacobs argues that these enigmatic reports were "buried" among the confirmed cases. (Jacobs, 241) In his analysis of a 1965 Lakenheath, England radar-visual case, Gordon Thayer wrote,“The apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation of this sighting.” Later discussion of this case notes that "The probability of at least one UFO involved appears to be fairly high", yet Condon completely ignores this conclusion. Another instance is Case Number 46, a series of photographs taken in 1950 in McMinnville, Oregon. The original photographic negatives were offered for inspection, and in his conclusion, Committee investigator William K. Hartmann wrote that, "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses."[6] Condon made no mention of this conclusion.
In the section devoted to UFO reports made by astronauts, Franklin Roach declared that three accounts related by astronauts Frank Borman and James McDivitt aboard Gemini 7 were "a challenge to the analyst" and "puzzling". Roach writes that if NORAD’s list of space object near Gemini was accurate (as he concluded), than the object Borman and McDivitt reported remained unidentified, and "we shall have to find a rational explanation" for the object, "or alternately, keep it on our list of unknowns." (Condon, 208) Again, Condon does not mention this intriguing report in his summary.
In 1969, as part of his lecture "Science in Default", physicist James E. McDonald said, "The Condon Report, released in January, 1968, after about two years of Air Force-supported study is, in my opinion, quite inadequate. The sheer bulk of the Report, and the inclusion of much that can only be viewed as 'scientific padding', cannot conceal from anyone who studies it closely the salient point that it represents an examination of only a tiny fraction of the most puzzling UFO reports of the past two decades, and that its level of scientific argumentation is wholly unsatisfactory. Furthermore, of the roughly 90 cases that it specifically confronts, over 30 are conceded to be unexplained. With so large a fraction of unexplained cases (out of a sample that is by no means limited only to the truly puzzling cases, but includes an objectionably large number of obviously trivial cases), it is far from clear how Dr. Condon felt justified in concluding that the study indicated 'that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.'"[7]
In a 1969 issue of The American Journal of Physics, Thornton Page reviewed the Condon Report and wrote, "Intelligent laymen can (and do) point out the logical flaw in Condon's conclusion based on a statistically small (and selected) sample, Even in this sample a consistent pattern can be recognized; it is ignored by the 'authorities,' who then compound their 'felony' by recommending that no further observational data be collected."[8] Ironically, Page had been a member of the Robertson Panel which suggested UFOs should be debunked to reduce public interest, though his opinions regarding UFOs changed in his later years.
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Allen Hynek's criticism
In his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, astronomer J. Allen Hynek discussed the Condon Report at length in a chapter titled "Science Is Not Always What Scientists Do." He argues that the report is so flawed as to be nearly worthless as a scientific study. In brief, Hynek argued, "The Condon Report settled nothing." (Hynek, 195) He also suggested that people should essentially read the Condon Report backwards: the case studies first, then Condon's summaries.
Hynek described Condon's introduction as "singularly slanted," but also notes that it "avoided mentioning that there was embedded within the bowels of the report a remaining mystery; that the committee had been unable to furnish adequate explanations for more than a quarter of the cases examined." (Hynek, 192)
Hynek argues that "Unimpeachable evidence shows that Condon did not understand the nature and scope of the problem" he was charged with studying. (Hynek, 207)
Like many other critics, Hynek notes that some of the unsolved cases were judged most puzzling. Particularly bothersome to Hynek was the overriding notion that UFOs were tied inexorably to the idea of extraterrestrial life. By focusing on this one hypothesis, the report "did not try to establish whether UFOs really constituted a problem for the scientist, whether physical or social." (Hynek, 194)
Furthermore, Hynek notes that the report relies on so few UFO reports that overarching trends may have been ignored.
Hynek also argues that the Condon Report was not scientific. They chose to hinge on the ETH, but, Hynek insists, the data are simply lacking to analyse that hypothesis and reach an informed conclusion. By not being able to demonstrate that a hypothesis was falsifiable, they violated one of the fundamental rules of the scientific method. The only hypothesis the Committee could have tested, Hynek wrote, was "There exists a phenomenon, described by the content of the UFO reports, which presently is not physically explainable." (Hynek, 201)
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Peter A. Sturrock's Criticism
Astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock has offered a number of detailed critiques of the Condon Report.
A review of Sturrock's critique notes that "This report has clouded all attempts at legitimate UFO research since its release. Much of the public, including the scientific community and the press, erroneously assumes that this project represents a serious, in-depth look into the issues. Sturrock assiduously dissects the Condon Report and makes it clear that the study is scientifically flawed. In fact, anyone who actually reads the report carefully will be surprised to find that Edward Condon, who personally wrote the Summary and Conclusions, did not investigate any of the cases. Rather it was his staff that did the legwork. That is why the report is internally inconsistent with the body of the document supporting some UFO cases, while the summary does not."[9]
In his own detailed critiques of the Condon Committee, Sturrock writes that "Another important point of scientific methodology is that, if one is evaluating a hypothesis (such as ETH), it is beneficial to regard this hypothesis as one member of a complete and mutually exclusive set of hypotheses. This point seems to have been recognized by Thayer ... but it was apparently ignored by Condon and other members of the project staff. It is of little use to argue that the evidence does not support one hypothesis, unless one known what the surviving hypotheses are." (Sturrock, 40)
Sturrock also criticizes the Condon Committee for heavy reliance on what he calls "'theory dependent' arguments. This requirement, above all, makes the appraisal of the UFO phenomenon very difficult: if we entertain the hypothesis that the phenomenon may be due to an extremely advance civilization, we must face the possibility that many ideas we accept as simple truths may, in a wider and more sophisticated context, not be as simple, and may not even be truths." (Sturrock, 40)
As a specific example of "theory dependent" analysis in the Condon Report, Sturrock notes a case where an allegedly supersonic UFO did not produce a sonic boom. He notes that "we should not assume that a more advanced civilization could not find some way at traveling with supersonic speeds without producing a sonic boom." Furthermore, Sturrock notes that J.P. Petit has “has proposed a procedure involving magnetohydrodynamic processes whereby the shockwave of a supersonic object would be suppressed.” (Sturrock, 40)
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Sources
"A Sledgehammer for Nuts"; Nature, Volume 221, March 8, 1969; pages 899-900
Jerome Clark; The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial; Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1578590299
C.D.B. Bryan; Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs and the Conference at M.I.T.; Alfred A. Knopf, 1995; ISBN 0679429751
Edward W. Condon, Director, and Daniel S Gillmor, Editor; Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects; Bantam Books, 1968
David Michael Jacobs; The UFO Controversy In America; Indiana University Press, 1975; ISBN 0253190061
J. Allen Hynek; The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry; 1972; Henry Regenery Company
David R. Saunders and R. Roger Harkins; UFO’s? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong; World Publishing, 1969
Peter A. Sturrock; The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence; Warner Books, 1999; ISBN 0446525650
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External links and Sources
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, Dr. Edward U. Condon, Scientific Director, Daniel Gilmor, Editor
UFO: An Appraisal of the Problem (from the AIAA)
Robert M. L. Baker Jr., The UFO Report: Condon Study Falls Short
Flying Saucer Fiasco, by John G. Fuller
The Condon UFO Study: A Trick or a Conspiracy? by Philip J. Klass. 1986
Science in Default: Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations, by James E. McDonald
UFOs And The Condon Report - A Scientist's Critique (James MacDonald Critique of the Condon Report)
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CONDON REPORT (from NICAP)
Dr. Thornton Page's Review of The Condon Report
An Analysis of the Condon Report on the Colorado UFO Project. Dr. Peter. A. Sturrock
USAF-Sponsored Colorado Project for the Scientific Study of UFOs, by Michael D. Swords, Ph.D.
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