PAIR OF PUEBLO YOUTHS PHOTOGRAPH STRANGE LIGHT IN SAN LUIS VALLEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010005-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 12, 2001
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: October 17, 1967
• Content Type: NSPR

`Approved For Re~ease 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81 R 000'F0- pye~_
Pair of Pueblo Youths Photograph
Strange Light in San Luis Valley
By R. SPENCER DARLING information, and the youths ar- side of Mt. Blanca. From a van- McFedries said he finally fell
ALAMOSA (C-SJ) - What ap- rived at the ranch, 20 miles tage point about three-quarters asleep and Boggs continued the
pears to be a significant UFO northeast of Alamosa, about of a mile up the mountain, over- vigil until the object blinked out
sighting has been photographed 10:30 p.m. The ranch is located looking the valley, they set their at 3:04 a.m. Boggs said the ex-
by two Pueblo youths who about a quarter mile west of camera on a tripod and began perience was frightening, par-
traveled to the San Luis Valley the Sand Dunes road. their watch. titularly when the object headed
for that purpose. McFedries' first entry in the toward the car, even though
A detailed report of the sight- Boggs and McFedries passed the UFO was several miles
the ranchh entrance by about log was 11 p.m. From then until The youths lap to return
ing, complete with a chrono- three-quarters of a mile and 1:20 a.m. the entries reported awaY? Y P
logical log written during the to watch for the object this
sighting, has been forwarded to turned east onto a road up the "no sighting." weekend.
Sightings Made at 1:20 A.M. I
Pic
in Boulder. Condon heads a U.S. At 1:20 a.m. Boggs said it was,
Air Force-sponsored investiga- like someone turned on a light.
tion into UFOs. There, out in the prairie was a
Reluctant to Talk brilliant, white diffused light,
Edward Boggs, 19, and Bill about the size of a penny, 'about
McFedries, 19, drove to the San, 50 times larger than the dots of
Luis Valley Friday evening. light made by cars and the
Complete with sleeping bags lights of Alamosa in the. dis-
and $8 for gas and food, they en- tance. They took two photo-
tered Alamosa about 9:30 p.m. graphs of it "to prove to our
Stopping at a local drive-in, they selves the next day that we
found it difficult to get a really saw something."
straight answer as to the loca-' The youths watched the light
tion of the King Ranch, the site and its antics until 3:04 a.m.
of numerous UFO sightings. Lu. ing this time ' it traveled
People were reluctant to talk, north; it appeared to go to the
or else made a joke of the whole Great Sand Dunes National
UFO business, McFedries said. Monument. Then it headed to-
A carhop finally furnished the ward their car, and finally
h
e
swung in an arc back to t
sight it was first seen.
During this trip, the UFO
traveled at varying speeds, its
light changing in intensity and
color. All the time the object
remained below the horizon
from the youths' vantage point
up on Mt. Blanca.
tures on Page
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 Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81 R00560R0001 00010005-6
FLYING SAUCERS
BY WARREN ROGERS LOOK WASHINGTON EDITOR
COMBAT PILOTS used to see them in World War II. Strange lights,
stalking their flights, and then suddenly ... whoosh . . . out of sight.
Sometimes, they had a shape, but unlike any known aircraft. Ameri-
cans called them "foofighters" and put them down for Axis experi-
mental planes. The Germans and Japanese thought they might be Allied
secret weapons. The war ended, memories faded, there was quiet.
Then, on June 24, 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold,
flying near Mount Rainier in the state of Washington, saw nine objects
traveling through the air in Indian file at what he estimated to be
1,600 miles an hour. "They flew," he said, "like a saucer...."
Nobody has seen a foofighter since. But from 1947 on, there
have been more than 10,000 reported sightings of flying saucers and
similar UFO's-Unidentified Flying Objects-creating an eerie national
sensation that Somebody Out There is watching us. Now, finally, the
U.S. Air Force is risking $313,000 to try to solve the riddle: Do flying
saucers exist? If they do, where do they come from? Outer space?
The eminent atomic physicist heading the project, Dr. Edward
U. Condon of the University of Colorado, is moving as cautiously as
the first man on the moon. His is only the first step, and a cheap one.
The money involved is close to the $200,000 minimum set by Secre-
tary of Defense Robert S. McNamara for any research grant on the
grounds that it takes-at least -that much "before significant results can
be expected." In Vietnam, $313,000 would pay for only the bombs in
one B-52 strike-$500 each for 648 bombs dropped by six planes.
An answer to the UFO riddle based on scientific research probably
would take millions of dollars. Neither President Johnson nor Con-
gress nor the American people have indicated that much interest. It
is not even clear that an all-out effort would settle anything. The UFO
conflict long since has escalated into a religious war, with "believers"
on one side and "nonbelievers" on the other, and Heaven help the
agnostics like Dr. Condon, who say they don't know what to believe
and try to find out through logic and inquiry.
Religious overtones are particularly strong when those who re-
port seeing a UFO also say they saw creatures aboard. Dr. Carl Sagan,
assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University, noted this in
Intelligent Life in the Universe, a book he coauthored with a Soviet
colleague, Dr. I. S. Shklovskii: "The saucerians [to believers] are
wise and gentle and loving ... all-powerful, all-knowing, and con-
cerned with the plight of mankind as a parent would be for his chil-
dren.... The saucer myths represent a neat compromise between the
need to believe in a traditional paternal God and the contemporary
pressures to accept the pronouncements of science." -
Dr. Sagan emphasizes, as do other scientists, that very few
sightings involve claims of contact with "saucerians." But there is a
religious fervor, nevertheless, in the insistence of saucer enthusiasts
that the Air Force either prove UFO's do not exist or concede they do.
"The one thing I don't expect to prove is that UFO's don't exist
because it is impossible to prove a negative proposition," Dr. Condon
told Loox. "I do think, however, that 90 percent of these sightings can
be explained as balloons, searchlights on clouds, or some other known
phenomena, natural or man-made. Yet for every sighting, I expect
there are ten or twenty others that have not been reported. And so,
we've got our work cut out for us."
The Air Force was delighted that a scientist of Condon's stature
76 LOOK 3-21-67
agreed to do the work. As the prime nonbeliever, it has been steadily
losing the credibility battle in recent years. Some of its explanations
were bungles-like blaming stars in Orion when that constellation was
not visible in the area involved at that season. Others came too late
to catch up with the first, spectacularly played press reports. Often,
there simply were no explanations at all.
"Mostly, we shrugged them off, and sometimes we sneered a
little," one official recalled. "But we couldn't get the UFO monkey off
our backs. And we never had the resources to check them all properly."
Air Force Intelligence began the inquiry into UFO's on December
30, 1947, with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency. Activities
were classified as "restricted" under the code name Sign, changed to
Grudge on December 16, 1948. On August 1, 1952, the enterprise was
declassified and rechristened Project Blue Book, with headquarters at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio. Not until last Sep-
tember 19, however, was the work taken away from Air Force Intelli-
gence and handed over to Research and Development scientists.
The size of the Blue Book staff may be another measure of how
little priority the Air Force, unpressured, accords UFO's. Although it
is the center to which all UFO reports are sent, manages to make some
on-the-spot investigations, and has put out 14 annual reports, Blue
-B-o-6-1-at Wright-Patterson consists of: Two' officers and one noncom-
missioned officer-Maj. Hector Quintanilla, Jr., 1st Lt. William E
Marley, Jr., and Staff Sgt. Harold T. Jones-plus a regular secretary,
Mrs. Marilyn Stancombe.
Quintanilla receives reports from the 100 or so Air Force bases
around the country, all alerted to investigate UFO sightings at once
and send word up the line fast. Quintanilla has orders to relay scientific
and military curiosities to appropriate officials. But mainly he keeps
score-total UFO's, total explained, total unidentified-and reports this
to Maj. Gen. E. Ben LeBailly, the Air Force chief of information.
LeBailly, a quick-smiling, hard-charging veteran combat pilot,
found, when he took over his post on January 6, 1964, that UFO's con-
stituted one of his worst public-relations problems. Every now and
then, he saw, the Pentagon was hit by a wave of flying-saucer stories,
and mostly it was failing to cope.
In 1947, when Kenneth Arnold added "flying saucers" to the
language, 122 sightings were reported. They rocked along at little
more than that until 1952-the year of the first jetliner passenger ser-
vice, the first H-bomb and Britain's first A-bomb-and then shot to a
record 1,501. The pace slipped to between 487 and 670 a year until
1957-the year the Russians launched the first Sputnik and the British
set off their first H-bomb-when the tally ricocheted back up to 1,006.
From then through 1964, the number varied between 390 and 627,
bouncing to 886 in 1965. Of the 856 reported for the first 11 months
of 1966, the Air Force "explained" all but 13, listing those as "un-
identified," meaning, "We have not been able to reach an evaluation
although we believe the observer has provided all possible informa-
tion." But of the 10,147 reports from 1947 through 1965, it had to
carry 646 as "unidentified"-including a record 303 "unidentified"
out of the record 1,501 tallied for 1952.
"With reports coming in at more than two a day," one Pentagon
official said, "General LeBailly was thrashing about for. something
to resolve the credibility question. We were being accused of a con-
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marksman since Annie Oakley
In Houston, the Big E is really big. He is
Elvin Hayes, a junior scaling in at 240 and tower-
ing at 6'81/2". Elvin shares top honors in scoring
and rebounding with Alcindor. On defense, Hayes
has blocked as many as a dozen shots a game. His
great timing, reflexes and spring bar shots from
the floor. And while he does sentry duty around the
bucket, the other Cougars scramble over the court
in a pressing defense for ball thievery that brings
easy lay-ups. Offensively, Hayes is not limited to
scoring near the basket. He is a constant threat
from the outside where, with his height, he can
drive for one of his patented "stuff" shots. Gene
Gibson, Texas Tech coach says, "If Hayes were
given credit for all the points he saves, as well as
all he makes, he'd average 100."
Out in Albuquerque, Mel Daniels, at 6'9" and
215 is another on the growing list of lordly intimi-
dators around either basket. Last season, he was
on his way to All America rank, but a collision
with a glass door slashed him down. Now a senior,
he has come back as a top performer at both ends
of the court. A strong rebounder, he is also a stylish
scorer at a 15- or 20-foot range. With his elevation,
a jump shot can be tough to handle. For the same
reason, his inside shooting is devastating. "Daniels
is the best total player I've seen since I've been
coaching at Seattle," says Lionel Purcell. "I didn't
think he could shoot from that far out with a man
right in his lap." Marty Blake of the St. Louis
What's got people talking
is the new
Lincoln Continental.
It's what every mother wants
for her son. The classic lines.
Refined for'67. The classic
ride. Serene. Velvety.
And effortlessly luxurious.
Hawks thinks, "Daniels is sure to go in the first
round of the NBA draft." Maybe the newly formed
American. Basketball Association can jingle suit-
able and attractive coin too.
Presiding over the selections was Larry
Boeck, formerly of the Louisville Courier-Journal
and now with the University of Louisville. Dis-
trict 1 was represented by Hank O'Donnell, Water-
bury (Conn.) American; District 2, by Gordon
White, New York Times; District 3A, John Bibb,
Nashville Tennessean; District 3B, Bill Brill, Roa-
noke (Va.) Times; District 4, Jim Enright, Chi-
cago American; District 5, Curt Mosher, Lincoln
(Neb.) Journal; District 6, John Hollis, Houston
Post; District 7, Dave Hicks, Phoenix Arizona
Republic; District 8, Mal Florence, Los Angeles
Times. Ed Schneider, USBWA secretary-treasurer,
Chicago American, paid the bills.
The nine-man committee noted that coaches
have introduced all manner of defenses as counter-
measures. One committeeman observed, "Some of
them now put on the press as soon as the other
team leaves the dressing room." The effect on
coaches of these attacks and counterattacks re-
minded another committee member of the story of
the retired basketball coach. Shortly after retire-
ment, the poor soul had to be put in an institution
because of his raving. "Too bad he had to quit
coaching," remarked one colleague. "If he had
kept on, nobody would have noticed the difference."
END
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 RDP81 R00560R0001 00010005-6
What are they and where are they from?
Plagued by UFO reports at the rate of two a clay
for 20 years, the Air Force cried
out for help. A tough-minded scientist
who worked on the atomic bomb
and is no stranger to controversy has answered
the call. The University of Colorado's
Dr. Edward U. Condon leads the quest for answers,
armed only with curiosity and scientific logic.
spiracy to hide something from the people, and members of Congress
were pressing us for action and explanations because they were getting
a lot of flak from constituents. We were not hiding anything, but we
knew we couldn't prove it. We had always taken the conservative view-
point-not denying the existence of extraterrestrial life or the potential
capability of some other beings to pay us a visit, but at the same time
pointing out that we don't have any proof. Nor do we have a terrestrial
explanation. We are not experimenting with flying saucers, and we
have no evidence that anybody else is, either."
Ready to spend its $313,000 on the study that LeBailly's cry for
help had produced, the Air Force felt out schools with outstanding
scientific reputations. The University of California and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology shied away, saying they had no qualified
people available. At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Condon
consented to pick up the hot potato. "I like a mystery," he explained
later. He could have added that he likes a good fight too.
Dr. Condon looks, at 65, like an elderly Huckleberry Finn. He
is chunky, crewcut, tweedy and laughs a lot, often at his own gravel-
voiced jokes;' dark eyes crancing behin 1 puffy lids and steel-rimmed
glasses. But he can be dead serious when the subject demands-be it
UFO's, his work with atoms, and the troubles he had during Washing-
ton's "security risk" witch-hunts shortly after World War II.
Condon was born in Alamogordo, N.M., near where the world's
first nuclear device, which he helped develop, was exploded in 1945.
That year, he went to Washington as director of the National Bureau
of Standards. In 1948, Chairman J. Parnell Thomas of the House Un-
American Activities Committee attacked him as "perhaps one of the
weakest links in our atomic security," and Condon responded: "If it
is true that I am one of the weakest links ... that is very gratifying and
the country can feel absolutely safe, for I am completely reliable, loyal,
conscientious and devoted to the interests of my country." He was
never called before the committee, and Thomas later went on to win
unexpected renown by serving a Federal-penitentiary term for taking
salary kickbacks from secretaries in his office. Condon left govern-
ment in 1951 to run private-industry research projects and teach,
joining the Colorado faculty full-time in 1964.
Condon has a free hand from the Air Force. The only condition
is that he report the results of his study by February, 1968. The Na-
tional Academy of Sciences will then review the findings in what the
Air Force calls "a further independent check on the scientific validity
of the method of investigation." Besides the regular eight-man team
Condon heads, he has about 100 other scientists on other campuses
he expects to tap for specific chores.
The eight regulars include five physicists and three psychologists.
The presence of the last three makes this the first study to investigate
what kinds of people report UFO's. Practically all sightings are sub-
jective and, like Beauty, often in the eye of the beholder. The psychol-
ogists will plumb the human inclination to link up cause and effect
without stopping to think-which was the case with that little boy who
took a stick and whacked a streetlamp just as a power failure blacked
out the Northeastern United States and part of Canada in 1965; he fled
home thoroughly shaken, convinced he had put out the lights all over
continued
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LOOK 3-21-67-77
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CONTINUED
town. There is also the other side of that: Rather than oversimplify,
some reject an obvious, logical explanation in pursuit of an esoteric
reason. The Air Force itself has pulled some psychological boners. It
used to use vague phrases like "things that happen in the air," but
when it accepted the term Unidentified Flying Object, it lumped all
sightings together-light, which neither flies nor is an object, as well
as detailed claims by people who swore they saw a metallic spaceship
land in a meadow and disgorge a specific number of humanoids.
As his strong right arm, Condon chose Robert J. Low, assistant
dean of Colorado's graduate school. A busy, friendly, ravenously curi-
ous man with a strong physical-sciences background, Low is "project
coordinator," which, translated, makes him chief of staff. The.three
other physical scientists are Dr. William Blumen, a visiting professor
of meteorology at Colorado; Dr. Joseph Rush, a specialist in optical
instruments at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, near
the university; and Dr. Franklin E. Roach, a faculty expert on airglow
and other atmospheric optics, who should be able to come up with
natural-phenomena explanations for many nighttime sightings.
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T HE THREE MEN who are studying the human-behavior aspects-
how much the UFO observer saw, how much he thought he saw
-are all professors in Colorado's psychology department: Dr.
Stuart Cook, who heads the department, and Drs. David R. Saunders
and Michael M. Wertheimer.
Among the 100 or so other scientists Dr. Condon has more or
less on standby is Dr. Julian Shedlovski, a chemist at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research. Shedlovski's specialty is carbon-
dating. This means he can tell, among other things, if an object has
been in space and, if so, for how long-a useful skill should Condon's
quest ever produce a purported spaceship or chunk of one.
Condon has already had a lively time of it. The publicity sur-
rounding his appointment on October 6, 1966, attracted direct calls
about UFO's almost from the start. In one, he was told that the pilot
of a plane taking air samples over Death Valley on December 15,1966,
had seen green lights at what he estimated to be 50,000 feet. Another
small plane nearby confirmed the sighting, and so did an airliner
traveling at 30,000 feet. Then the Tonopah, Nev., Air Force station
broke into their excited radio exchange with, "We sent that up-that's
green fluorescence, aluminum trimethyl, at 400,000 feet-we're study-
ing wind currents." Three trained observers had themselves a UFO,
until facts got in the way. But Condon had another call giving him a
case that must await the spring thaw for the application of fact.
"The caller said he was one of four men who saw a UFO on the
Utah-Idaho line seven years ago," Condon remembers. "They were
out hunting, and this thing came down in a meadow a mile or two
away. They watched it land and then take off on a bounce. They
agreed not to say anything about it. And then one of them read about
this study and called the two others-the fourth man had died in the
meantime, of a heart attack, I believe. They went back to that meadow,
and there, seven years later, they found three circular depressions,
each ten inches deep and ten feet in diameter, forming a fifty-foot
triangle. They saw the same impression in another spot, where they
figured it bounced on takeoff. He said there was a lot of grass grow-
ing around but nothing growing in the holes. He guessed it was burned
out by radioactivity. My guess is we can't tell a thing now with all the
snow on the ground there, but we'll check it out come spring."
Condon doesn't believe or disbelieve anything at this point, ex-
cept for one thing: "I won't believe in outer-space saucers until I see
one, touch one, get inside one, haul it into a laboratory and get some
competent people to go over it with me. I would like to capture one.
After all, that would be the discovery of the century-the discovery
of many centuries-of the millennia, I suppose." But if Condon is un-
able to do that, or to disprove space crockery, he will be in the same
fix as the Air Force. He will catch hell from the hoaxers, the charlatans
who make money out of UFO's, the fanatics who have made them a
religion, the hallucinated-the whole gamut of oddballs and hustlers.
He will also catch it from saucer aficionados and even some scientists
who, often in a highly unscientific way, cling to a syllogism that
wobbles something like this: Agreed that intelligent life may exist in
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other solar systems and that it may be advanced enough to fly here as
easily as we put astronauts in space; agreed that we cannot identify
all UFO's; therefore, those UFO's that remain unidentified can only be
intelligently controlled vehicles from outer space.
Some members of the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) seem to take this tack. NICAP, consulted
by Condon and the Air Force, is a private, nonprofit research organi-
zation incorporated in Washington, D.C., 11 years ago. It conducts
on-site investigations of UFO reports and, over the years, has attacked
the Air Force for, it charges, "an intolerable degree of secrecy, keep-
ing the public in the dark about the amount and possible significance
of UFO evidence." NICAP's major work to date has been a thick, de-
tailed report, The UFO Evidence, sent to every member of Congress
two years ago and on sale for the price of a book. In the report, the
NICAP board-of governors declared:
"Given the evidence in this report, it is a reasonable hypothesis
that the unexplained UFO's are: Real physical objects, rather than the
result of imagination, hallucination, illusion or delusion; artificial,
rather than purely natural, such as meteorological and astronomical
phenomena; under the control (piloted or remote) of living beings."
Recently, NICAP and other expert-rated theorists were challenged
in a way that suggests they may have done some unscientific jumping
to conclusions. Philip J. Klass, avionics editor of Aviation Week &
Space Technology, a major technical journal, wondered why almost
nobody mentioned "ball lightning" as a possible UFO cause. An Iowa
State graduate in electrical engineering, he knew vaguely about it.
He probed deeper and wrote two articles expounding his theory. His
hope was that somebody would pick it up and prove -or disprove it-
which Dr. Condon now expects to try to do.
Klass's theory is that hundreds of UFO's are ball lightning or other
plasmas of ionized air, sometimes containing charged dust particles
and sometimes vortices of tiny charged ice particles. As a charged
mass, they dart about, attracted by objects with unlike charge and
repelled by those with the same polarity. Klass believes that some low-
altitude UFO's are the products of corona discharge along high-voltage
'power lines under certain conditions. At high altitudes, the same
phenomena could be generated by discharge of "natural" electricity
continued
LOOK 3-21-67
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 -RDP81 R00560R0001 00010005-6
FLYING SAUCERS CONTINUED
between clouds or layers of charged dust or ice particles. Dust-ice plas-
mas could explain some daytime UFO's, as could "dust devils" or "dust
dervishes" churned up by twisting winds. Light reflected off any of
these could give the impression that they are made of metal, with
windows and even little men walking around inside.
Plasmas show up well on radar, and their collapse, when the poor-
ly understood conditions creating them expire, could explain myste-
rious UFO disappearances and quick getaways. They also change shape
easily, perhaps giving the impression of "wobble" so frequent in re-
ports and of the sprouting of tailfins, the lowering of ladders and so
on. At Exeter, N.H., one UFO was thought to be tapping a power line
for energy when it lowered a glowing line; in reality, it might have
been a corona-bred plasma being attracted back to its source.
The earth, if charged correctly, would attract a plasma, too, ac-
counting for "landings" and charred spots observed on the ground
afterward. UFO observers have reported sore eyes and even "sun-
burn," also possible with plasmas. Others say their UFO's made "hum-
ming" or "whirring" sounds, and so, sometimes, does ball lightning.
"Analysis of hundreds of NICAP reports," Klass says, "reveals
that the two adjectives most -frequently used to describe night sight-
ings are `glowing' and `luminous.' Other frequently used adjectives are
`phosphorescent' and `fluorescent.' It is impossible to find more pre-
cise adjectives to describe the appearance of a plasma."
Richard Hall, assistant director of NICAP, concedes that "ball
lightning probably accounts for some UFO reports," adding that his
organization has been investigating ball lightning "for at least five or
six years." The NICAP report made no mention of it, however.
The scientific community interested in UFO's is generally as
pleased as the Air Force that Condon agreed to take a crack at them.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University, UFO consultant to the
Air Force, conferred with some of Condon's group and afterward ap-
plauded their open-mindedness. Dr. James E. McDonald, a physicist
at the University of Arizona, is similarly pleased with the Condon proj-
ect and has suggested, along with some others, that the Russians
should be asked to join in an international investigation.
All the same, it seems clear that when Condon ends his groping
through the eerie unreality of the UFO hassle, his efforts are unlikely
to be capped with a popularity prize. He will explain too much for
those who want to believe and not enough for those who don't.
But Condon knew that all along. He warned the Air Force when
he undertook the job: "The study will not necessarily contribute to
the nation's peace of mind." END
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