Here is a great article for those who doubt that astronauts also have UFO sightings. And this time it is being proven that the US government tried to delete some of the records.
For twenty-two years, from 1947 to 1969, the United States Air Force (USAF) operated a trio of UFO programs, respectively called Project Sign, Project Rancor and Blue Book Project. The most familiar to the public is undoubtedly the last mentioned, which also recently starred in a series of History Channel.
However, less known to fans is the reason why these projects were discontinued.
The end, at least in official terms, was due to a controversial 1,500-page report produced by what was known as the Condon Committee, a group funded by the USAF that, from 1966 to 1968, met at the University of Colorado to study Non-Flying Objects Identified under the direction of physicist Edward Condon (hence his name) and deciding whether it was worthwhile to continue spending resources on research on the phenomenon.
Spoiler alert: They concluded that UFOs were not worth the time.
Edward Condon But, over the years, something very strange and suspicious has happened to this report: part of it has been removed by the government agency charged with disseminating it.
The Condon report has always been disqualified and is now distributed online mainly by the Technical Defense Information Center (DTIC) – of course, if you know how to find it.
The Black Vault, a website dedicated to upload declassified documents obtained through FOIA applications (Free Information Act – Freedom of Information Act), made the report available to the public in 2018, noting that 70 pages were missing.
The missing pages section, highlighted in the Condon Report Summary. John Greenewald, webmaster of The Black Vault, said:
The missing section is probably the most interesting of all. According to the report’s index, the missing pages correspond to UFO sightings made by NASA astronauts. An attempt to gain access to pages lost in the DTIC was unsuccessful. Apparently, the original document scanned by the agency lacked the aforementioned astronaut section.
Note that there are some online copies of the Condon report, in text-only format, and that the missing pages are in most of them. So the point is not that the missing section was outside the public domain, but that a government agency decided to exclude it from the official copy. To find these copies outside the official channels of the US government, you need to look in some “dark” places on the web; in fact, results on Google yield only six results (see screenshot below).
These versions would be copies created by the organization National Captal Area Skeptics more than twenty years ago, after working directly with the University of Colorado to generate them.
Despite this, the original copies of the report released by DTIC – presented as complete – remain incomplete.
THE Black Vault began its search for the original pages in December 2019. The most logical place to search was the University of Colorado, where the study took place. However, emails and all attempts at contact were ignored.
In June 2020, a complete copy with the missing pages included was discovered in the archives of the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), a Commerce Department agency born after the Second World War. According to a text on its website, this agency is currently dedicated to “providing support and structure” to its partners to “guarantee the storage, analysis, ordering and aggregation of data in new ways”. The archives are made up of a large database of technical reports, which have been operating privately for decades, but are now open to the public.
The Condon Committee report found on NTIS is a full scan of the original, with all the pages, reaffirming the notion that they are really the most interesting. In chapter 6, three sightings of astronauts are labeled “unexplainable”:
The Condon report states that the three sightings of astronauts James McDivitt and Frank Borman were a mystery and that they did not have an adequate explanation.
On the pages, McDivitt, a member of the Gemini 4 mission, reported “a cylindrical object with a bulge”, even mentioning that there was a footage of that unknown object obtained by NASA four days later. However, the space agency released only a few photos that appeared to be modified – cropped and enlarged – so that the object sighted by the astronaut was not visible.
Astronaut James McDivitt McDivitt risked a mundane explanation, saying that it might be an artificial satellite. This was taken into account by Condon investigators, who were unable to identify any artificial satellite as responsible for the sighting.
The report also mentioned a sighting during the Gemini 7 mission. The object seen by Borman was called “bogey”. When the mission’s Control Center tried to determine if it was one of the propellants, the astronaut confirmed that he also had the propellant in sight, which was impossible. The “bogey”, then, was classified as a real unidentified object.
Astronaut Frank Borman The section on UFOs and astronauts concludes the following:
The training and vision of astronauts places their observation reports in the most credible category. They are always meticulous in describing the ‘facts’, avoiding any biased interpretation. The negative factors inherent in spacecraft observations, discussed in this chapter, would appear to be more or less balanced by the positive advantages of good observers in a favorable region. The three inexplicable sightings that have been compiled among the large number of reports are a challenge for the analyst. Especially intriguing is the first on the list, the view of an object showing details like arms (antennae?) Protruding from a body with wide angular range. If the NORAD list of objects near the GT-4 probe during the observation period is completed, as it probably is, we must have a rational explanation or, alternatively, keep it on our list as unidentified.
Metadata or information hidden in certain files has been revised for the Condon Report files. Black Vault compared the NTIS version (complete) with the DTIC version (incomplete). It was revealed that the version of NTIS was digitized six years before the first one stored in the DTIC. Likewise, the software application used for this task was different; therefore, there were probably two different manual / physical scans, with the last 70 pages removed.
But, instead of how those pages disappeared, the mystery is why. One, two and even a few pages missing from a 1,500-page document is something that can happen accidentally, especially if the material is half a century old.
However, removing a 70-page set that deals with a specific topic is likely to be intentional. The reason?
No official response
In search of lost pages
Astronaut sightings
Metadata
