Created: 15 December 2006
Updated: 3 December 2016
(NICAP.org)
Quote from the UFO report:
“This chronology (now 6 pages) includes UFO incidents
and related events for 1969. Our thanks for these chronologies must go to our
documentation team: Richard Hall (the original 1969 chronology from UFOE II),
William Wise (Project Blue Book Archive), Dan Wilson (archive researcher), and
Brad Sparks (Comprehensive Catalog of Project Blue Book Unknowns). Last, but
not least, our thanks to Jean Waskiewicz who created the online NICAP DBase
(NSID) that helped make it possible to link from the cases to the reports
themselves. The latest reports come from Mike Swords.
On. December 17, 1969, Secretary of the Air Force
Robert C. Seamans, Jr., announced the termination of the two decades of
operations of the highly visible AF investigation of UFO’s, Project Blue Book.
This was only the announcement date, not the actual termination date, but the
AF release was worded in such a way as to suggest immediate termination of BB.
In fact BB did not terminate until Jan. 30, 1970, at 3:30 p.m. EST, as NICAP
found out and published in the May 1970 UFO Investigator (p. 3a).
In the last year of its official existence, Blue Book
received 146 UFO reports of which only one received the unidentified
classification. For the 22 years that the Air Force investigated UFO’s it
received nearly 15,000 reports of which some 587 were classified as
unidentified. (Air Force press releases listed the total number of 701
unidentified in the statistical summaries of yearly totals. But today only
about 587 are listed by UFO sighting date and location in the declassified
monthly indexes.) Due to diligent research, the number of ‘unknowns’ has
doubled from that 701 figure to more than 1,600 in Brad Sparks’
revised catalog, and may reach as high as possibly 3,000 to 5,000, based on
estimates of the late Dr. James McDonald and Sparks.
Towards the end the BB files received fewer and fewer
military cases. The Air Force’s position was that UFO’s were no longer seen by
the military simply because they were trained observers who cannot be fooled by
such things. Historically, however, that was not true and did not explain why
so many military observers in the past saw and even instrument-tracked UFO’s. In
reality, the trend in the BB files reflected the changes in UFO reporting
channels. The Air Force had started shifting military reporting of UFO’s into
operational reporting channels such as those set up under AF Manual 55-11 of
1965 (now AF Instruction 10-206), and many classified regulations, which
bypassed BB.
All seemed dead on the UFO front, but major events
were just a few years away. The UFO debate was rapidly dying out in 1969 in the wake of the
Condon Report and the closure of BB. NICAP and APRO catastrophically lost
members, down from roughly 14,000 for NICAP and 8,000 for APRO to just a few
thousand.
NICAP Site Coordinator
June 5, 1969; St.
Louis , MO
4:00 p.m. This radar/visual was ‘written off’ as a
meteor and observed by three air crews. Four dart-shaped objects witnessed by
American Airlines Flight 112, a 707
heading east at 39,000
feet , a United Airlines flight eight miles to the rear
at 37,000 feet ,
and a National Guard jet four miles further at 41,000 feet . Objects
were tracked on FAA radar at St. Louis
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(tageo.com photo)
