by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
The first two years of the 1970s seems to have been a slow period for UFO reports, if the 1970 and 1971 UFO Chronology hosted on the National Investigations Committee on Arial Phenomena website is any indication, with the 1970 chronology consisting of 5 pages, and the 1971 consisting of 8 pages. As a comparison, the 1966 chronology page count is 35 and the 1967 count is a massive 85. This might have been expected after the conclusion by Edward U. Condon in his report that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.” This prompted the U.S. Air Force, which had funded the study led by Condon at the University of Colorado, to shut down Project Blue Book in 1969. There is a comment to this effect in the 1971 chronology: “An apparent lull in sighting reports may be the result of the closing of Project Blue Book and the media coverage of this for several years, and may not reflect the actual situation.” By 1973, things would pick up in a big way (35 pages in that chronology) with high-strangeness cases dominating the headlines. In 1972, however, there was a report that seems to have presaged the things to come. Read more
New Jersey, as everyone in UFO world is aware, was ground zero for a full-on flap involving what most witnesses reported as mysterious drones. What’s noteworthy is that this same region was where residents panicked during Orson Welles’s radio production of The War of the Worlds in 1938. It’s also the area where there were two flaps in 1966, one in January and another in October, with the most dramatic reports centered around the Wanaque Reservoir. In this blog, we’ll focus on the January flap. At that time, several different investigators arrived on the scene, and as a result, there are several different versions of what happened.
On Saturday, January 11, I paid a visit to David Marler at the new facility in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, housing the contents of the National UFO Historical Records Center. The NUFOHRC is a recently formed non-profit organization, and the facility consists of two buildings provided by Rio Rancho Public Schools on the campus of the Martin Luther King Elementary School. In one of the buildings is a treasure trove of, well, UFO Historical Records, including the case files of the big three in twentieth century UFO investigation: the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the Center for UFO Studies, and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. The APRO files had been in private hands since APRO ceased being active in 1988, and I was particularly eager to see those, as well as see the facility and offer congratulations to David. 
From the very beginning of the flying saucer/UFO mystery, Joseph Allen Hynek played a huge role as an investigator. According to him in his 1972 book, The UFO Experience, in 1947 he was asked to be a scientific consultant for the Air Force’s investigation program (which was then called Project Sign) based at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. He explains he was “then director of Ohio State University’s McMillan Observatory and, as such, the closest professional astronomer at hand.” He remained a scientific consultant for what operated as Project Sign, Project Grudge, and then Project Blue Book as of 1952, up until its termination in 1969. He went on with his own investigations, formed the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, and continued as its director until his death in 1986. In his almost 40 years of involvement with the mystery, Hynek’s beliefs and public stance evolved quite a bit. 
Amidst the reports of drone incursions over military bases and northern New Jersey, there was a story that made the news involving video footage reportedly taken by a co-pilot of an unidentified object in the sky above Manchester Airport in England, along with still shots of what was said to be the same object, seen to be a blue sphere, hovering over the tarmac. As is typical of UFO coverage in the news these days, when it’s not about what government officials think about the phenomenon, the origin of the story was a post on social media with no real names provided for the poster or the source. All that was left for those with an interest in the case was to conduct some rather imaginative analysis of the footage and argue back and forth over the possible alien origin of the object. 
John Keel, most well-known as the author of the 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies, was a controversial figure in flying saucer/UFO world back in the late 1960s and throughout the 70s due to his unorthodox views. He was first and foremost a fortean (interested in all things strange) and it was his view that whatever was behind the flying saucer/UFO phenomenon was not extraterrestrial and might be behind other phenomena as well. From May 1969 to April 1974, Keel put out the “irregular newsletter,” Anomaly. He asked those wishing to receive a copy to send him a self-addressed, stamped manila envelope, and the number of copies he printed depended on the number of envelopes he received. For fans of Keel, 
The history of UFOlogy is made up of stories that range from genuine mystery to outright fraud. The choice of what to take seriously and what to discard can be difficult for those in the early stages of exploring the subject. A good maxim to start with might be “consider the source,” and some good claims to examine with this in mind are those involving metals (lately referred to as “metamaterials”) said to have been recovered from flying saucers/UFOs.
