UFOs in an Air Force Academy Textbook

by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear 

After the termination of Project Blue Book was announced on December 17, 1969, throughout the early months of 1970, much was made in the press of the fact that the Air Force was no longer in the flying saucer/UFO game. Then, the existence of a physics textbook being used at the Air Force Academy that had an entire chapter devoted to UFOs became known to UFO researchers, and it was mentioned (briefly on page 4 of pdf) in the May-June 1970 APRO Bulletin that “it caused quite stir in UFO circles in the first half of 1970.” The mainstream press didn’t become aware of it until an article was published in the October 11, 1970, issue of the National Enquirer with the headline “Air Force Academy Textbook Warns Cadets that UFOs May be Spacecraft Operated by Aliens from Other Worlds.” As sensational as this headline is, it isn’t far from the truth, and after news of the chapter’s existence was published in the mainstream press, it was quickly revised. Remarkably, the author of the chapter was a major in the Air Force who was a physics professor at the Air Force Academy.

The textbook was Introductory Space Science, published by the Academy in 1968, and was edited by Maj. Donald G. Carpenter, who was the author of Chapter XXXIII, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” which was the last chapter in the book. According to USAF Director of Information Colonel James F. Sunderman in a reply to an inquiry from the Lemoore, CA, Advance, it was used in Physics 370, an elective course attended by around 20 students per semester. Sunderman describes the textbook as “a two-volume, 470-page unpublished work printed in a spiral notebook by the Academy for classroom use.” He describes Chapter XXXIII as “out of date” as it was written when Project Blue Book was still active and the Air Force was sponsoring the UFO study at the University of Colorado. The study was led by Dr. Edward U. Condon and concluded “that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.” This led to the termination of Project Blue Book.

Air Force The 14-page chapter is remarkable in that there is no mention of Project Blue Book (Grudge is mentioned), and it reads more like one of the popular UFO books available at the time, than anything one might think a professor of physics employed by the Air Force would write. In fact, popular UFO books available at the time are listed as references, and some of the inaccuracies reported therein are repeated in the chapter.

One of these is a reference to The Book of Dyzan, which can be traced back to Theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky, who claimed to have read it in Tibet. Carpenter describes the “book” as “a group of ‘story-teller’ legends which were finally gathered in manuscript form when man learned to write,” and he tells a story said to be taken from it involving beings that came to Earth “many thousands of years ago” in a metal craft, settled in separate cities and eventually went to war with each other with what Carpenter suggests could be interpreted as atomic weaponry. He then gets into the ancient alien hypothesis for three paragraphs.

The Book of Dyzan story comes from Flying Saucers – Serious Business, the 1966 book by Frank Edwards, and Carpenter includes another bit of humbug from that book involving a farmer named Alexander Hamilton, who is said to have issued a sworn statement in 1897 that a cow of his was lifted up by a red, half-inch-thick cable attached to a 300-foot-long, cigar-shaped ship. Jerome Clark discovered that the story was concocted by Hamilton and his friends, who were all members of a local liars club.

Carpenter does describe more credible cases such as the April 24, 1964, case in Socorro involving Socorro Police Sergeant Lonnie Zamora, the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill case, and even includes the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville goblin incident. Along the way, he speculates that UFOs are manned physical craft and describes four types of aliens: three-and-a-half-feet-tall creatures with silver suits and space helmets and arms reaching below the knees, creatures that look like Earth people, creatures with thin lips and wrap-around eyes, and four-feet-tall hairy creatures weighing about 35 pounds.

Carpenter discusses “Attempts at Scientific Approaches” to the UFO question, including Aimée Michel’s theory of “orthoteny,” but fails to mention the Air Force funded study begun in 1966 at the University of Colorado.

Carpenter’s conclusion is that there is “the unpleasant possibility of alien visitors to our planet, or at least of alien controlled UFOs…” but adds that “the data are not well-correlated” and suggests that “A solution to the UFO problem may be obtained by the long and diligent effort of a large group of well-financed and competent scientists.”

Sunderman informs the Advance that, as of the fall 1970 semester, the chapter had been replaced with a revised version. This version is 7 pages long, mentions Project Blue Book, that the Air Force “was often accused of trying to cover up the UFO problem,” and that this resulted in the University of Colorado Study.

The bulk of the chapter examines eight hypotheses proposed by Dr. James McDonald that include UFOs being: hoaxes, advanced Earth technology, extraterrestrial visitation, and “messengers of salvation and truth.” The conclusions are that no single hypotheses can account for UFOs, that there is not enough evidence to support some of them, and that the last one “is unlikely to yield any form of scientific analysis, so we eliminate it from further consideration.”

The chapter closes saying that the UFO problem must now compete for attention with all the other problems facing science and that while the Condon Report “cautioned that nothing worthwhile was likely to result from such research,” it did suggest that government and private agencies should consider UFO research proposals “on an open-minded, unprejudiced basis.”

Curt Collins looks into the story of Chapter XXXIII and includes details of Donald Carpenter in “UFOs, Aliens, & U.S. Air Force Academy Textbooks” posted February 23, 2022, on his site The Saucers That Time Forgot. According to Collins, “The tabloids revived the story every few years, as if it were a new discovery.” What was missed by the tabloids is that the original chapter made it back into the Air Force Academy classroom and other classrooms in the revised edition of Carpenter’s textbook titled Environmental Space Studies published in 1972 by the Whitehall Company. Collins includes a letter written by Carpenter’s supervisor, Head of the Physics Department Col. Anthony J. Mione, to William Gordon Allen informing him that they were using the textbook. Allen was the writer of the 1976 movie Overlords of the UFO and the letter is featured in the movie.

Collins points out that a “misinformation loop” was created by Carpenter’s choice of sources and that some of the spurious tales were repeated by Donald Keyhoe in his 1973 book Aliens From Space. He includes a review of the book by John Keel, which includes this criticism: “Keyhoe just quotes the AF Academy rubbish which, he must have known, was lifted almost entirely from Frank Edwards.” According to Collins, “Keyhoe was just one of many ufologists who recirculated Carpenter’s UFO chapter as proof of the Air Force’s cover-up about their true knowledge of extraterrestrials and their spacecraft. Generations since have carried on the tradition.”

According to Collins, Carpenter self-published the 1973 science fiction novel The Treacherous Time Machine under the pseudonym “Merlin Mesmer Merlino,” had an interest in how human life might be extended, and wrote about “ghosts, souls and paranormal entities” for the magazine Analogue Science Fiction after his retirement from the Air Force in 1977. Collins adds that in 1984, Carpenter published the paper “Weighing the Soul at Death: Some Methodological and Theoretical Considerations” in Theta, Journal of Psychical Research 12 where he suggested “the energy required for a ghost to function is limited to around 60 Joules based on anecdotal reports,” and, in 1998, published the ebook Physically Weighing the Soul.

Carpenter died on March 27, 2011. Collins memorializes him this way: “Donald G. Carpenter made a sincere effort to present the complexity of the UFO topic to students based on the best available knowledge at the time. He earned the right to be remembered for that.”