Stuff You Should Know - How Project Blue Book Worked, Pt I

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry over there.

She's all dressed up in a silver jumpsuit, as usual. A jumpsuit? I said, I pulled it out. Should we edit that out and retake it? No, I think we should leave it. Jerry, behind the scene stuff, everyone, Jerry sometimes has to get what's called room tone, which means she has to roll tape digitally,

and we have to be completely silent for a few moments so we get the tone of the room for, I don't know, purposes of magic. And every time she's done that, we always have the urge to giggle or fart or be six-year-olds. So she looks at us sternly the whole time during that five or six seconds of room tone. Oh, man, it's so funny.

I don't know what that instinct is, and I was just like, we can't sit here for five seconds and not speak without cracking a joke. We've got a bit of the class clown in us, I think is what it is. Oh, boy, I sure did. Still do. Oh, yeah, were you the class clown, really?

Yeah, but on the down low, like I wouldn't fire out something for the whole class to hear unless I knew it was like comedy gold, but I would work my circle around me. I got you, you know? Yeah, your regional act. I was fairly disruptive. Oh, okay. But it was always fun.

So teachers liked me, but they were just like, just shut up though, sometimes. Well, your parents are educators, so you knew where the line was, right? Sure, I danced around it. Were you going over the line because you could get away with it? No, I mean, they weren't teachers.

I mean, actually, that's not true. My dad was the principal, but I didn't start real cutting up till high school. I got you. Why are we talking about this? I don't know. I'll tell you why, Chuck, because it reminds me of Hennie Youngman.

Okay. We just so happened to be around the peak of his career on June 24th, 1947. Did you fact check that? No. Okay, because then we're gonna get a letter. Hennie Youngman's career peak was in 1948, you morons. You do get paid during a government shutdown.

Oh, yes. Are we gonna correct that now, or should we do it at listener mail? No, we might as well correct it now. Yeah, so I got it wrong big time, and we heard from apparently 900,000 of our million listeners are government employees who worked through the last shutdown

because all of them emailed in and said, hey, by the way, whether you worked or not, if you were furloughed, you got back pay this time. But we were right. It does take an act of Congress. It doesn't happen automatically. What is this, take an act of Congress? Yes, it does.

So we got that one wrong. I got that one wrong. Chuck went along with it further, went along for a while. Per usual, uh-huh, yep. Sure, yeah, that sounds good, Josh, whatever you say. I wanna get your back, you know. I appreciate that. So anyway, back on June 24th, 1947,

it was a very important day because you can use this day to basically pinpoint the moment that America's just ongoing fascination with UFOs and by extension aliens began. It did not exist basically before that time. Yeah, why do you think that is? Because I think a skeptic, and we're gonna talk a lot in this episode

about skeptics and believers, for lack of a better word, skeptics would say like, while all of a sudden in 1947 that UFOs just start appearing. And I think there were some answers to that. Oh yeah. Like, I don't know, maybe they just found this. Or maybe they just decided to start poking around our airspace.

Well, that presumes that there is actual like, UFOs and extra, yeah, they. Yeah. Do you have another explanation for if there isn't a they? Well, maybe just newspaper, I mean, were there no like even newspaper reports pre-1947? As far as I know, all of it began on June 24th, 1937.

All right, well then my answer is the aliens started their business then. Okay. On that day. Okay. And I mean, there would have to be basically a day zero if that ever really did start. They had to start somewhere.

Yeah, why not June 24th, 1947? Who knows, they may have been zipping around with the dinosaurs. Maybe. But the dinosaurs didn't put that on the news. Nope. Did they? No.

See? Well, they didn't preserve any of their own news reels at the very least. That's true. For me, the explanation is mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, that kind of stuff. All right, so on June 24th, there was a man named Kenneth Arnold.

He was a pilot, a private pilot, not a private in the army who was a pilot. No. Private sector pilot. Sure. I think that really got across with the private pilot. Sure. And he had a good reputation.

He wasn't some, he was known around town as a respectable business guy. Yeah. And he was flying near Washington's Mount Rainier. And he was looking for a downed plane. I guess he was a search and rescue guy. I think he was just helping out. Maybe he's pre-civil air patrol.

It was, or right around the time that it started. Okay. But even still, I think he was just being like a good Samaritan who had his own plane and was helping. Like I'll help look. Sure. And he saw, and this is a quote, nine saucer-like things flying like geese

in a diagonal chain-like line, and estimated the speed of these saucer geese to be 1,200 miles per hour, which really is pretty funny. Well, at the time, he must have been going probably about 50 miles per hour in his old little prop plane. Right. So 1,200 miles per hour, that was really saying something.

You wouldn't hardly be able to see it, I would think. So he lodges this report, and within just a few hours, this is what I don't know how this happened, but within a few hours, the Associated Press got wind of this. The AP is a wire service, which means like they do the reporting and they send it out to newspapers for syndication,

and newspapers just print what the AP wrote all over the country. So the AP picking it up made it national news almost the same day, basically, that this man had seen something, and in this AP report, the writer coined the term flying saucers. Yeah, because Kenneth Arnold had called them

saucer-like things that were flying, and he went, let me just rearrange this in a way that's a little more grabby. Flying what? Flying what? He saw a saucer. Geese-like. Saucer geese.

Flying saucers worked, and it was a big deal, and all of a sudden, everyone starts seeing, we didn't call them UFOs yet, just keep your pants on, we'll get there. Flying saucers. Flying saucers. Or flying discs. Right, there was even in 1947

in the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline that said, flying saucer is seen in most states now. So that headline was printed on July 7th, 1947. Kenneth Arnold saw his reciting on June 24th. Yeah, a couple of weeks. Atops. Yeah.

And within that time, so many reports happened that basically every state had a report of a flying saucer now. Pretty amazing. It was like a flood gate opened. Yeah, which if you're in the United States Air Force at the time is problematic because they were in charge of security for anything not on the ground

in the United States. Yeah, the airspace. Yeah, I guess that could count the sea, and that's the Navy, so yeah, I was trying to say it in a more clever way. But I think they're, yeah, you're right. Airspace, sure. And what are we gonna do here?

Is this a threat to America? Like, do we need to start legitimately investigating this stuff right after Pearl Harbor? The Cold War is starting to heat up a little bit, and people are freaked out, and we need to see what's going on at least. Yeah, people were a little jittery over in that decade in particular.

So the Air Force does decide that it needs to do something, especially at the behest of a guy named Lieutenant General Nathan Twinning, who was the commander of Air Material Command, and he wrote a memo titled Flying Discs, and he basically said, we need to figure out what is the deal with all this, because these reports that are coming in

are describing things that shouldn't be possible. So let's look into this. And he had enough clout that a project, an Air Force project was created named Project Sign. Yeah, this is the first of what will be several projects which culminated in, you know, I think the final one was just shut down like six or seven years ago.

Like officially. Well, 2012? I don't know if it's technically related to sign, but it followed in the tradition of it. I mean just projects investigating UFOs. By the U.S. government. Yes, like officially designated investigations. Yeah, the one you're referring to

was supposedly shut down in 2012, but some claim it was never really shut down. Exactly. As is usually the case. That's right. So this project signed technically was originally called Project Saucer. Not bad.

It's okay. I like Project Sign cooler or more. It sounds cooler. Yeah. Yeah, don't you think? It sounds very mysterious. Well, yeah, I'll give you that. What is it related to?

It's not as good as the next one, but we'll get to that. Okay, so Project Sign is associated with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It's assigned to it. The project has run out of Wright Field at the time outside of Dayton. And if you were a UFOlogist, you would say, well, of course it's Wright-Patterson.

That's where they reverse engineer all the alien technology. Yeah. Of course, that's where they would investigate it. And they actually do reverse engineer technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And they have since World War I when a downed German biplane was captured.

And they took it to Dayton and said, figure out how this works. That's a really interesting job and project, I think, reverse engineering stuff. Because it's basically copying. I mean, I get why they call it reverse engineering because you're starting at the end and going backwards. But just to be handed, here is an enemy, whatever.

It could be a weapon. Potato can. Yeah, whatever. And say, just figure out how it works so we can build one if we want to. Or if it's not worth our time, then at least we know how it works. Exactly.

Or we can come up with measures to counteract it. Yeah. How can we destroy this or copy this? What kind of potatoes are they using in there? Those new potatoes, they'll put a hole right through you. New potato caboose? Oh, yeah. Do you remember that, man?

Was that a real band or one you made up? I can't remember. No, that was real. It was like a little hippie shake band. That's right. So the long and short of it is, anytime Wright Patterson is mentioned, that's when the, who's the one guy that everyone, the meme always posts, Aliens Man.

Oh, the guy from Ancient Aliens? Is that what it was from? Which I knew his name. Do you remember, that's one of the first things that Aaron Cooper did of us. Oh, really? Was us as the ancient Aliens guy. One of the first stuff you should know, meme copies?

Yeah, after Van Nostrand's era ended. Oh, sure. After Van Nostrand's reign of terror ended, Cooper picked up the thread. Some might say Van Nostrand's continues today. His reign of terror? Yeah, just not Photoshop based. Right.

So yeah, if it's Wright Patterson, then people are going to think there's something going on there. And like you said, there was a lot going on there, including very secret projects that are still going on there. Right. And supposedly that's where they took the Roswell flying saucer. Which also happened in 1947. A lot of people connect those dots.

But apparently, Roswell and the crash and Aliens didn't really become part of cultural consciousness until the 80s. That's right. Anyway, so project science going on. And in 1948, the following year after Kenneth Arnold first had his sighting, they released a document called The Estimate of the Situation.

And these are Air Force personnel working on project science. Sure. OK? And they get together and they say, you know what? We don't think that based on some of these sightings, and in particular, what we consider very credible witnesses describing very incredible things, that they have any kind of origin in US or even USSR

technology, and there's a possibility that these are extraterrestrial in origin. And that was the basis of this estimate of the situation that they handed off to Air Force, the Air Force brass. And the Air Force brass said, are you out of your minds? So in the end, the report basically said we can neither confirm nor deny the very famous line that everyone uses these days, which basically means

there's something going on. Yes. But remember, we found the place where that first was coined. What was that? The Glomar Explorer. Right. And that wasn't until the 60s. So I think this is somebody using an anachronism here.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think it necessarily said that in the report, but that was the upshot, basically. They just said it with different words back then. Sure. So here's the deal, though. There were a lot of people that worked on this thing that would have probably confirmed it.

It was kind of split between people like maybe there's something going on here and people that just didn't think so and probably didn't want to deal with it. Yeah. I didn't have a sense of just how evenly split it was, but there were definitely people working on this project who said they're extraterrestrial in origin and other people who said, no, we just don't understand it.

The Air Force brass, like I said, said, are you guys crazy? You actually made this document and got their hands on all the copies, destroyed them all. And as a matter of fact, the Air Force has always denied that the estimate of the situation never existed and that any understanding that it did exist came from people who did work on Project Sign who said,

no, this did exist and this is what it said. And this is the reaction it got. Yeah, it's kind of hard not to like, because we're both fairly skeptical, but it's hard not to go down that conspiracy trail a little bit when you hear stuff like, nope, that report never existed. And people that worked on it are like, no, it totally existed.

And here's what it said, here's what it was called. And they just basically incinerate the thing. Right, you had a copy, I saw it. You made little flower doodles on it. It's really hard not to go down that road. It really is. And that's kind of part of the problem with all this is because there's this huge massive public viewing

of all of this stuff, reports, suggestions, it becomes a thing. And at the same time as we'll see the government is simultaneously investigating it and then denying it. Right. And it created kind of a weird headlock on the nation's psyche. Yeah, so there was one citing in Project Signs book and report that doesn't exist,

that most everyone was like pretty impressed by. And that was the Chills or Chilis? Chiles. Wided, Wided. Wided? I'm going with Chiles Wided. The Chiles Wided UFO encounter. And that was in Alabama in July of 1948.

And this is the beginning of what you will see as a recurring thing where it's not, you know, the drunk farmer in the field or the college student's partying, you know, in a cul-de-sac. It's like military pilots or airline pilots, like people that are trained to understand aviation and know what doesn't look right. Right.

And this one was two Eastern Airlines pilots. They were flying a DC-3 and they said, they nearly collided with, and here's the quote, a strange torpedo shaped flying object that looked like, quote, one of those fantastic Flash Gordon rocket ships in the funny papers. It doesn't really help the legitimacy. No.

But the fact that these guys described it, that they were sober at the time, that they were both trained commercial pilots, it really did impress a lot of people working on sign. And it did kind of give them this confidence that there may be something going on that we don't understand here and we need to investigate this.

Right, but for the Air Force's part, General Hoyt Vandenberg said, no physical evidence, no case. Exactly, and he's the one who allegedly ordered all of the copies of the estimate destroyed. And he also basically ordered from on high, look, all of this can be explained somehow, some way, using our current understanding of science, go make that happen.

It's what came to be known as the conventional explanation paradigm, which I put this together long enough ago now that I can't remember if that's an actual thing or if I coined that. Oh, the CEP? Yes. Sounds official to me.

It does. When you say it that way. But I also have a very dry style. Sure. So it's entirely possible I came up with that. But that is, there are three things basically, three causes of why somebody might think they have seen a alien ship.

Under the CEP. Under the CEP. Mass hysteria and hallucination, which is what you think. Dogs and cats. Hoax, which is, that's super easy to believe that someone, plenty of those have happened. Yeah, remember crop circles? Sure, yeah.

And then misinterpretation of known objects, which is a very big bucket that you can toss things into if you're the military. Yeah, because there's a lot of weather phenomenon, and celestial phenomenon, and unfun phenomenon. You can just make stuff up and say, they were looking at this.

Right, rubber bands. What? It was rubber bands? How are you gonna prove otherwise? You'll note though, in all three of those explanations, none of them say extraterrestrials. No. Or even secret unknown technology.

Right, because that's not conventional. Right. Or an explanation, well it is an explanation, but it's not conventional. But it doesn't fit the paradigm. It does not. And then they actually worked with the Saturday evening post, which everybody was reading at the time,

and they did a two-part article, which debunked Flying Saucers. And this was sort of the beginning of, kind of like a, not kind of like, very much a PR campaign to debunk Flying Saucers. Yeah. Should we take a break? I think we should, Chuck, we've reached the break part.

All right, we'll move on to Project Grudge right after this. Here we go. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, so here's the thing, though, the Air Force, even if they really genuinely were like, no, man, there's no such thing as aliens.

Whatever this is, it's just Americans being freaked out about the Cold War, OK? Let's just call it that. This is the Air Force brass talking. I'm doing my best impression of them. They still needed to investigate them, because the Air Force is charged with protecting US airspace. And there are reports coming in on a daily basis

from all over the country of unidentified objects, flying saucers, flying through American airspace. So they still needed to investigate this. But the Air Force decided they could investigate it on their own terms. And so project sign was dissolved and replaced by what this is your favorite name for. Project Grudge, which is named so exactly why you think,

because they didn't want to be messing with this stuff. No. They should have called it project. Are you freaking kidding me? Right. Are you joking right now? I got to do what? Do you hear yourself?

Yeah, that was the attitude in the Air Force at the time. You didn't want to get assigned. You might have been like one person that was super into it. I think they were a handful. But generally, you didn't go into the Air Force to do this. And you were probably irked if you were assigned this duty. Yeah, I got the impression that this was something like being stationed in Greenland,

or Siberia, or Alaska, or something like that. Probably not Siberia. I bet Greenland's nice. No, it's not. Alaska's lovely. OK, depending on uninhabited Canada. OK. OK.

Canada's great. Anyway, I got the impression this was like a backwater assignment, where if you ticked off your commanding officer, they would put you on Project Grudge. Oh, you should have said South Georgia. OK, yes. Albany. The worst place in the world.

Sure. So yeah, you call this the Dark Ages of Air Force UFO and investigation. Because Project Grudge was the basic tenet there was, we're here to debunk these claims. Not so much investigate, but just a debunk. Right. Not only do these have some sort of conventional explanation,

even when they seem like they don't, we're still going to give them a conventional explanation. Right. Because that's it. Because these are not extraterrestrials, and we're sick of this S-word. Yes. That's what the Air Force said.

That's right. And one of the people they hired as a civilian scientist consultant was a man named, very important figure in this whole story. Jay Allen Heineck from The Ohio State University. You did that, huh? And he is a prominent astronomer. Does that make you mad?

A little bit. I'm not sure why either, but it does. OK. He was a prominent astronomer, and he was recruited specifically to be chief debunker. Right. And that's how we saw his role, for sure, too. Especially initially.

So he was a UFO skeptic. To him, he really kind of fell in line with that mentality that everything could be explained as a hoax, or a misunderstanding, or a misidentification. But he was also a scientist in his core. He was a very well-respected astronomer, and he believed that this should still be investigated, especially cases where somebody who was like a trained pilot,

or an astronomer, or a meteorologist, or somebody had seen something and reported it, and that it seemed incredible. Those incredible sightings by credible people. That was kind of the confounding thread that wound through these decades of investigation of UFOs. Yeah, and the other thing, too, that you got to remember about Heineck was he was very much

the face of this debunking. And it's a role that he would grow to loathe over the years, to say the least, because we'll get to some of the more ridiculous explanations. He was the one that had to parrot this stuff out. Yeah. They'd shove him out there. He'd be like, and then all of a sudden,

he realized there were cameras in his face, and he'd say, hello, everyone. That's what he was famous for. Was that his intro line? That's how he'd start every press conference. So one of his first efforts here, and this was, and maybe his most famous, this was the 1948 case of Captain Thomas Mantell.

He was an Air Force pilot who died when his P-51 Mustang went down while he was chasing a UFO. That sounds like an Air Force pilot and a P-51 Mustang. That's what you would do. Let me go after that thing. Sure.

I want to see what it's like. That's what Maverick would do. Yeah, I guess so. You excited about that movie? I know. No? No. Did you see the trailer?

No. I'm gonna show it to you. It has, is Tom Cruise de-aged in it? No. They should have just gone with that. So are you excited about it? Listen, man, I like Top Gun. I was not some like,

I didn't think I was some big nut for Top Gun, but when I saw that trailer, it gave me a little bit of the feels for sure. Oh, really? Yeah, man, I was like, why am I so excited about this? Wow, okay, well, maybe I'll give it a chance. I guess I'm a child of the 80s, but when I saw him on that Ninja motorcycle or whatever,

riding around with his helmet on, that music. Who is Top Gun now? Well, I think the deal is now he comes back and now there's a brash young kid. Right, who's the brash young kid? Is it Christian Navarro? I don't think so. I predicted it would be, and I don't think I'm right.

Well, he would have been better than whoever they got, is what I'm saying. Because he's a friend of the show and the other guy is probably not. No, of course not. Although if it turns out he is, then it would be an even match. That's right.

We cast are a lot behind people who listen to stuff you should know. They're the only respectable people. All right, at any rate, I will go see this. I will, to my dying day, not see the remake of Red Dawn, despite at least a friend of the show, if not a former friend of the show, producing that film. Oh, Luke?

Yes. Yeah, he says it stinks too. I'm not sure you're allowed to say that. You might want to email him first. Okay, okay. So, okay, Heineck, the P-51 goes down and Heineck says, you know what? He may have been pursuing and chasing Venus.

Sure. And they went, you know that's a planet? He went, yeah. So maybe, and it was daytime and you can't see Venus in the daytime. Right. He went, yeah. I'm just gonna stick with Venus.

I'm gonna stick with Venus. Goodbye. And there were, that was just one explanation. And there were other ones, obviously, the weather balloon thing has always been a big one. Right. Conventional aircraft that you just, you know, you saw it in the wrong light, maybe.

Yeah, so, you know, like you watched X-Files and everything, right? Sure. Okay, do you remember how like just kind of like, agitated Mulder would get, and he'd start talking really fast when he, he would just be talking about all the ridiculous explanations that have been given for UFOs?

This is where that actually started. Yeah, yeah. With Jay Allen Heineck. For sure. And giving these public explanations that over the years, as we'll see, really stretch credibility, reason, logic, common sense, and became just kind of a PR problem for the Air Force.

Yeah, because it might have been nothing or something explainable, but to just brush it under the rug as X or Y, like, hey, it's Venus. It's like, that makes them do nothing but look bad. Like they're not even taking it seriously. Right, right, exactly. And I think in the Air Force's defense

or from the position they were coming from, they didn't think the American public could handle an unknown, you know? Oh, sure. Just by saying like, oh, I don't know what it was. We don't know. It wasn't a UFO, everybody. It wasn't an alien.

Sure. It wasn't the Russians, but we just, we can't say what it was. They were not prepared to just go out there and do that. Yeah. And again, in their defense, I think America may have proven them right. They would have just been like,

I knew it, it's aliens and so it is. Yeah, well, they didn't want that. They didn't want that kind of hysteria getting whipped up. Which is why they explained everything no matter how ridiculous it was. That's right. So this happened more and more and more. More sightings would come in.

Air Force would trot Heineck out there again with his hello and goodbye. And in between a bunch of BS, basically. Yeah, everything from balloons, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar reflections, large hailstones was one that really got everybody. That's a good one. But as far as the Air Force is like going out there

and just explaining everything in the actual project, people are saying like, there's some out there that we just don't understand. Yeah. There's something, some core of this phenomenon. Yes, a lot of it is probably mass hysteria. Yes, a lot of it is misidentification, but there are again, credible witnesses

who are giving these reports and we just can't quite explain these. Yeah, there was one in particular in September of 1951 that really kind of brought things to a head. This was in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. And these were, I mean, there were pilots, there were radar operators. They observed fast moving,

highly maneuverable disc-shaped aircraft. And this is something that you're gonna see again and again and again. They're always super fast and can do things that they've never seen aircraft do, like start and stop on a dime and turn and do these weird things that are inexplicable for really experienced pilots witnessing this stuff.

Or travel even just 1200 miles an hour. It's like, there's not anything that at this time was supposed to be able to do that. Right, and so Project Grudge, the personnel there had to investigate all the stuff. And the chain of command basically was to report it to major, or well, the man in charge

was Major General Charles Cabell. He was the head of Air Force Intelligence at the Pentagon. Yeah, and because these were military witnesses, it was a military incident, he wanted this directly to him. That's right, so there was one Grudge investigator, Lieutenant Jerry Cummings, not Jerry sitting next to us.

No. She's never been in the Air Force as far as I know. What? She's been telling me otherwise for years. Really? Oh yeah, she's a big time impostor if she hasn't been in the Air Force. So he actually believed that they were quote, intelligently controlled.

What they investigated, he thought, he's basically using code for aliens man. Right, like the guy from Ancient Alien. Exactly. So here's the thing, that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings who headed up this project for Grudge, he was on the side of people who were like, no, this is being just swept under the rug,

it's not being seriously investigated, and he actually griped about it to the head of Air Force Intelligence. Cable that guy. Cable, right? That guy, Cabal, Cable? Cabell? Cabell.

Okay, and Cabell was like, what? You guys aren't actually investigating this stuff, this is all just a PR campaign, and he was told affirmative, sir, affirmative, and he went a little nuts. Oh, that's what happened. Yeah. Okay, it wasn't quite clear on what made him that.

I didn't write it very well. Okay. So he said, okay, this is ridiculous that we're not actually investigating it. Gotcha. That's going to change. So he had enough clout that he got Grudge dissolved. Oh, I thought he didn't like Grudge.

He didn't like the way that Grudge was conducting this investigation, which is to say not at all. This makes more sense. And he instead said, we need to do something else. We need to revamp this whole project. We're going to dissolve Grudge, create a new project, we're going to call it Project Blue Book,

because at the time, college exams were given in these standardized blue test books, and he said that we need to approach this with all the seriousness of a test in college. Gotcha. We're going to call this Project Blue Book, and we're going to get a new guy to head it up, a guy named Captain Edward J. Ruppelt,

and he could not have found a better guy to head Project Blue Book. All right, let's take another break. And we should also announce this is a two-parter. I don't think we said that at the onset. Well, that was going to be the big cliffhanger. Oh, was it? Yeah.

It was going to be like the Bicycle Repair episode of Different Strokes, where no one claps. Everybody just sits there and stuns silence. Well, we can still do that. Okay. All right. Well, then, to start, you should know who I am. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Project Blue Book in this special two-part

episode, this is the second half of part one. Oh my God, you just confused me so bad. This was the new jam after Project Grudge. And you mentioned Edward, Captain Edward J. Rappel, or is it Rappelt? I've been calling them Ruppelt. Oh, really? Yeah, your son's a little more regal,

so let's go with Rappelt. OK. Man, do people get sick of this? I can't believe they don't, but they don't seem to our numbers are steady, if not still growing. I imagine that we lose 0.5% of listeners over pronunciation alone. Oh, probably more than that.

We're lovable in almost any other way. OK, so Blue Book is happening, and under the command of Rappelt, it is the salad days of official military UFO investigation. I'm glad you use salad days. Have you ever seen the Monty Python salad days sketch? Geez, I don't know. They're playing tennis in the late Victorian era, and all of a sudden, it just turns into this bizarre blood

bath. People lose arms, and sometimes head falls off, and there's just blood everywhere. Just watch it again. OK, any time I hear salad days, it's what I think. Monty Python, so great. So the objectives of Blue Book were one, determine whether UFOs are a threat to US security,

because that's the big deal. That's why the military is involved. It's not just like, oh, we just got to calm people's nerves. Like we said earlier, they really had to do this, because they can't, if Independence Day happened, they can't be the ones who are like, oh, we quit investigating this stuff because we thought it was just movies and science fiction.

Yeah, yeah, that's the impression I have. They don't want to investigate this, but they have to. It's a security concern, just in case. And at the very least, the Air Force has to be showing the country that they're investigating it, that they're on top of any security concerns like this. That's right. So that was the first objective.

Number two was, and this makes sense as well, to determine if they possess they, meaning the aliens, I guess, any unique scientific information or advanced technology that we could use. Yeah, and it didn't necessarily have to be aliens. It could have been the Soviets, too. I think that was probably the largest suspicion among people who said, no, this is real.

Not necessarily that it's aliens, but maybe the Soviets are way, way further ahead than we think they are. Yeah, like maybe they have some advanced spy plane in the US. I don't want to spoil anything, but we had good reason to believe that might be going on. Right. You know what I mean? I know what you mean.

I hope no one else does. So you can thank Mr. Repelt, or Captain Repelt, by creating the term UFO. Yeah, he was like flying saucer, flying disc. Those are in disc geese, he said, who even came up with that? Those are totally unscientific. We need something that just kind of resets things and says, this is a scientific investigation.

And it worked. I mean, it's easy to think UFO now sounds so goofy and unscientific, but when you break down the words, it's the classification that really worked at the time. It's just kind of gone on to feel like something else in meaning. Oh, yeah, it's definitely got a lot of cultural baggage around it now.

But at the time, yeah, it was an unidentified flying object. Exactly. And one of the other benefits of creating this new term was that they are also allowed to kind of redefine it. Right. And they defined it really broadly as any aerial object which the observer is unable to identify. Which is, I mean, it's a really broad definition.

And it also puts the onus for figuring out what that object was on the investigator. It's like basically saying, somebody saw something, they don't know what it is. Here's the description. Go figure it out. Yeah, and to his credit, he was like, let's get a database on a computer.

And everyone said, what's a computer? He said, it's right here inside this warehouse. The warehouse is the computer. That's right. Plug it in. And he was going to apply statistical methods to really try and figure something out, drew up these questionnaires for people.

Right, a streamlined questionnaire. Yeah, stuff like a draw picture that will show the shape of the object. What was the condition of the sky? Did it suddenly speed up or rush away? Did it change shape? Did it flicker? Did it throb?

Did it pulsate? And everyone went, this is creepy. And they shoved the questionnaire back across the table. Right. But the US Air Force basically designated a special officer to collect all these reports. Every base had one. Every single base.

And they all had to send those to Wright Patterson. Right, exactly. So they were taking this really scientific approach that was saying, we don't know what this is, but we're going to apply science to it. And we're going to get to the bottom of it. And as a result, they said, OK, because this definition for unidentified flying object is so wide,

because it's up to us to investigate, we're going to come up with three categories that these can possibly be placed into. There is identified where we figured it out. It was a meteor. It was a weather balloon. The person was drunk on corn whiskey. Who knows?

There is insufficient data where they're like, I don't know, it was just this thing that flew by. You'd say, OK, that's an insufficient data one. And then the last one, the most famous one, is unidentified, where no matter what they try during this investigation, they have enough data, they have a good enough description, but they can't correlate it with any known object

phenomenon technology. And as a result, because of this open-mindedness led by Captain Rappelt, there was a 25% unidentified rate in Project Blue Book's investigation during his tenure. That's right. 3,200 reports. 69% were misidentification of known things. 9% were insufficient information, I guess, insufficient data.

And then known category, 1.5% were crackpots. 8% were probable hoaxes, but basically miscellaneous. And then 22%, I think, said 25. Is it 22? Yeah, I'm sorry, it's 22. Yeah, 22% unknown. Unknown or unidentified. And to this day, the official number

of unidentified flying object sightings that remained unidentified and unexplained is 701. That's a magic number. Yeah, there are dudes out there with that tattooed on the back of their neck, probably. I want to believe. Is that the end of part one? I think so, Chuck, it's a pretty good spot.

Yeah, so as is tradition with two parters, we're not going to do a listener mail, but we'll do a call out for help with you guys, like we do every now and then. So it really helps us out if you guys leave ratings and reviews on iTunes or the pod catcher of your choice. And tell a friend, a coworker, that you listen to stuff

you should know and you get a lot out of it. And that stuff really is what made this show popular to begin with. Yeah, and we appreciate the continued support. Yeah, we try not to ask much, a couple of times a year maybe. Yeah, please, sir, may I have another review? Yes, yeah. OK, well, if you want to get in touch with us in the meantime

while you wait around for part two, you can go to stuffyshouldknow.com and follow us on social. And as always, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. About my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.