In December 2019, John Greenewald Jr. began looking for seventy pages.
Greenewald is the founder and webmaster of The Black Vault, the most extensive publicly accessible archive of declassified government documents in the world, compiled over more than two decades through thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests. He had made the Condon Report available on The Black Vault in 2018 using the version distributed by the Defense Technical Information Center, the government agency responsible for making scientific and technical documents available to the public. And he had noticed, by comparing the document’s table of contents against its actual pages, that a section was absent.
The missing section was Chapter 6: UFOs and Astronauts. Seventy pages. The most credible witnesses in the report’s entire witness pool, trained observers with technical expertise whose observations the chapter’s own text described as placing their reports in the most credible category, were not in the official government version of the document.
The absence was not random. Missing pages in a fifty-year-old document can be attributed to physical deterioration, scanning errors, or handling damage. Missing pages that happen to constitute a complete, topically defined chapter whose subject is the most credible category of UAP sighting evidence in the report is a different kind of absence.
Greenewald documented the missing chapter and his subsequent search for it in published accounts that are in the available record. His attempts to contact the University of Colorado, where the study was conducted, were ignored. His attempts to obtain the complete version from DTIC were unsuccessful.
In June 2020, he found the complete version. It was in the National Technical Information Service’s archive, a Commerce Department agency whose database of technical reports had been operating privately for decades before opening to the public. The NTIS copy was a complete scan of the original document, including the seventy pages that the DTIC’s official version excluded.
Greenewald compared the metadata of the two versions. The NTIS version had been digitized six years before the DTIC version and used different scanning software. Two separate manual scans of the physical document had been conducted. The second scan, which produced the DTIC’s official publicly distributed version, did not include the astronaut chapter.
Whether the exclusion was intentional or a scanning error is the question that the metadata establishes as worth asking. Seventy pages constituting a complete chapter on a subject is not consistent with random scanning error. It is consistent with a decision about what the publicly distributed version of the document should contain.
What the Recovered Chapter Says
The recovered astronaut chapter’s content is the reason the question of intentional exclusion is significant rather than administrative.
The chapter contains three astronaut sightings classified by the Condon investigators, who were specifically tasked with determining whether UAP required further scientific study, as genuinely unexplained. In a report whose official conclusions determined that UAP warranted no further scientific study, three sightings in the chapter covering the most credible witnesses were classified as lacking adequate explanation.
The Condon investigators’ own text in the recovered chapter is specific: 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 three sightings follow.
James McDivitt, Gemini 4, June 1965. McDivitt reported a cylindrical object with a protrusion, which he subsequently described as resembling a beer can with an arm sticking out. The sighting occurred during the Gemini 4 mission in June 1965 and was documented in his mission debriefing. McDivitt suggested the object might be an artificial satellite. The Condon investigators checked the NORAD catalog of objects near the GT-4 spacecraft during the observation period and could not identify any artificial satellite that matched the description or position of the sighted object.
The additional detail from the recovered chapter is the NASA footage: McDivitt reported that NASA subsequently released footage of an unknown object obtained during the mission but that the released photographs had been cropped and enlarged in ways that made the originally sighted object invisible. Whether the cropping was deliberate or reflected standard photographic processing decisions whose purpose was unrelated to the sighting is not established by the available documentation.
Frank Borman, Gemini 7, December 1965. During the Gemini 7 mission whose fourteen-day duration was the longest human spaceflight at the time, Borman reported a bogey in a position relative to the spacecraft. Mission Control asked whether the object might be one of the spacecraft’s thruster exhaust products or fuel dump material. Borman confirmed that he was simultaneously observing the thruster exhaust in a different position, ruling out the simple identification. The Condon investigators classified the Borman object as a real unidentified object.
The third sighting, also documented in the recovered chapter, has been less extensively reported in the secondary literature and its details are in the original chapter rather than in the summaries that circulated before the chapter’s recovery.
The Condon chapter’s conclusion about all three sightings is quoted directly in the recovered text: the three inexplicable sightings are a challenge for the analyst. Especially intriguing is the first on the list, the view of an object showing details like arms or 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 complete, as it probably is, we must have a rational explanation or, alternatively, keep it on our list as unidentified.
The Condon investigators acknowledged in their own language that they had no rational explanation for McDivitt’s sighting. This acknowledgment is in the chapter that was absent from the DTIC’s official public distribution of the report.
The Low Memo and the Study’s Predetermined Conclusions
The missing astronaut chapter exists in an institutional context that the broader Condon Report history establishes before the DTIC version’s exclusion.
Robert Low, the project coordinator who managed the University of Colorado study’s day-to-day operations, wrote an internal memo in August 1966, before the study had begun collecting data, that described the approach the study should take. The memo’s language has been quoted in multiple published accounts of the Condon Report’s institutional history: the trick would be to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would appear the opposite.
The Low memo was not part of the original report. It was discovered by study participants who were subsequently dismissed from the project for sharing it. Its existence and content are documented in the UAP research literature.
Whether the Low memo accurately describes the institutional approach that produced the Condon Report’s conclusions, or represents a careless expression of a more nuanced institutional position, is a question that the report’s conclusions, no further scientific study warranted, contrasted against the report’s internal findings, three unexplained astronaut sightings in the chapter covering the most credible witnesses, raises with force.
The Robertson Panel recommended predetermined conclusions in 1953. The Low memo described predetermined conclusions in 1966. The DTIC’s official document excluded the chapter containing the most credible unexplained findings in 2018. The pattern across these three documented institutional actions is consistent across sixty-five years.
What the Pattern Documents
The institutional pattern documented across the Robertson Panel, the Low memo, and the DTIC chapter exclusion is not conspiracy in the speculative sense. It is a documented sequence of institutional decisions about what UAP information should be publicly available and in what form.
The Robertson Panel is documented. The Low memo is documented. The DTIC chapter exclusion is documented through metadata analysis. The three unexplained astronaut sightings are documented in the recovered chapter.
James McDivitt reported a cylindrical object with what appeared to be an arm or antenna during the Gemini 4 mission. The NORAD catalog could not explain it. NASA’s released photographs were cropped in ways that made the object invisible. The chapter documenting this was excluded from the official government version of the report for decades.
Frank Borman reported a bogey that was simultaneously visible alongside the spacecraft’s exhaust, ruling out the simple identification. The chapter documenting this was excluded from the official government version of the report for decades.
John Greenewald found the complete version in June 2020 in a database that had been operating privately for decades before opening to the public.
The chapter is now accessible. The exclusion is documented. The metadata analysis is published.
What the astronauts saw in 1965, and what the Condon investigators classified as unexplained in a report whose official conclusions said there was nothing unexplained, is in the recovered chapter.
The government agency responsible for distributing the document to the public did not include it.
Whether this was a decision or an error is the question that seventy pages of astronaut sightings and a metadata analysis establishing two separate scans with different content have made permanently answerable in only one direction.
