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

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

A rash of UFO sightings kicks off a new spike in America’s UFO fever and new headaches for the Air Force, which continues to reluctantly investigate. After becoming a laughingstock for its limp explanations, the Air Force looks for an exit from the UFO biz. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there.

This is part of Project Blue Book. Let's go. That's right, where we left off, Project Blue Book has officially been launched. They're doing a pretty good job of investigating stuff at this point. The salad days. Salad days of official investigation.

You know, every time I hear salad days, I think of Monty Python, a sketch about, it's just called salad days, it's great, you should look it up. I'll check it out. Is there blood? I need blood in my Monty Python sketch. I need a lot of blood in it.

Okay, I'm in then. So let's talk about 1952. This was a big, if you wanna talk the salad days of UFO sightings. Speaking of salad days. This is one of the big years. There were 1500 and one UFO sightings in 1952, which in 1951 there were 169, so there's a lot.

Yeah, almost an increase of 10 times. That's right, pretty close. In order of magnitude. That's right. Yeah, so that's a pretty big uptick, I guess you could say, and it just so happens that the Air Force had positioned itself already to investigate this stuff with an open mind.

Yeah, and there were some big ones. Like there was one where the Air Force scrambled jets to intercept what they called brilliant objects over Washington. They were on radar and seen visually in the sky. And Major General John Sanford, he was the Director of Intelligence, actually briefed the FBI on this one and said,

it is not entirely impossible that the object sighted may possibly be ships from another planet, such as Mars. He shouldn't have added that last bit. No, really, really sucked the wind out of his credibility. Yeah, because he had it going with a pretty good sentence there, and he could have just said from somewhere else in the galaxy.

He might as well have said Uranus. Right, he might as well have said Martians. So, Sanford also, I got the impression, he went a little bit rogue here. He held a press conference from what I understand of his own accord to reassure the general public that the Air Force was on the case and that yes, it's true, we can't really explain all this stuff,

but we're looking into it. But he included the word however, which is very important because what followed that was, however, a certain percentage have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It is this group of observations that we now are attempting to resolve. Yeah.

But there is no conceivable threat to the United States. Right. I don't know if I would have felt better hearing that presser. I wouldn't have. I would have been like, I knew it. I knew it, the world's about to end. Yeah, Martians.

Who knows who's gonna replace Tom Cruise and Top Gunn. There's just utter chaos and disorder. That's right. So there was an article much the same way that the Saturday evening post helped put it kind of a damper on the UFO craze at the behest of the Air Force back in the 40s. The UFO fever that spiked in 1952 was helped along

by a Life Magazine article. But not from the Air Force behest. No, no, it was like the opposite. Yeah. It was called, have we visitors from outer space? It was just such a 1950s headline, you know? Yeah, and they offered or they said they were offering scientific evidence

that there's a real case for interplanetary saucers. And then I think about 10 sightings that they kind of just went over in great detail. Right, it was a very long article. It was, it really made the case that, yes, there was probably extraterrestrials visiting us. I bet that was a big issue of life. Sure.

I bet they sold a lot of those. Yeah, and they, I mean, it landed really well and really hard among the American public because they were in the grips of UFO fever again. So while this is going on, like it had kind of died down a little bit, this craze. And in fact, the, I think the Air Force was kind of surprised when it flared up again

because it had a little bit died down from 1947 to say 1949, 1950. Then all of a sudden in 52, I don't know where it comes back. It's like a hemorrhoid you thought you'd taken care of. Exactly. That's an exact analogy, it's perfect. So the CIA, they had been kind of keeping tabs on this stuff.

I wondered about this when I was reading this. I was like, where are they this whole time? That's exactly what they wanted you to wonder. And then conclude they're not doing anything. Exactly, because that'd be on the news, right? Right. So it turns out that the CIA was doing something even though it wasn't on the news.

There was a guy named H. Marshall Chadwell. Where did all these people come from? Yale or something? That's crazy. But everyone involved in this UFO investigation came from Yale. They sound like blue bloods. So he was the assistant director

of scientific intelligence for the CIA. And he basically said, hey, we don't know what these are by the way. I don't know if you've been paying attention to this stuff, but we should probably investigate it. That's right. So he got a panel impaneled. There's really no other way to put it.

Ooh, I like that word. In 1952, and it was led by a physicist, a very famous likable physicist named Howard Percy Robertson. He was likable physicist. Sure. He was very, very well liked in his class at Yale. He would be H. Percy Robertson at Yale, though. Oh, I guess so.

He would go by Howie. He loosened the club tie by going by Howard Percy. Yeah, so he was from Caltech. And he looked into this thing and they had this panel and they met for four days, 12 hours, a few hours a day. And that seemed a little skimpy to me, but whatever. Same here. If you only got three hours a day to do this.

They just basically went around the room taking turns reading that life magazine article out loud. I guess so. And then discussing what they thought about it. So Repelt is still here. He's the head of Blue Book at the time still. Heineck was there. He's still around.

He's never left, right? No, he's part of this ongoing project of investigation. And then other people that were involved that should have been in the room and were in the room. And they were all presenting what they thought were the most interesting cases to what would be eventually known as the Robertson panel. Right.

And the Robertson panel said, thank you very much, all of you will be in touch. Don't call us, we'll call you. And they issued a final report and it said that 90% of all UFO cases could be explained by meteorological, astronomical, celestial, known scientific stuff. Sure.

Technology. That's believable. Okay. The other 10% though, if we spend enough time and energy investigating it, we could also explain those. Yeah, that's where the BS comes in. Their conclusion was that given enough time and effort, 100% of all UFO sightings could be explained

under known scientific or technological explanations. And no one said, so are you saying that 10% of these are so confounding that you can't explain them? And they went, yeah, but we could. We just don't have enough time. Right, exactly. It's a really passive aggressive way of saying there's no such thing as aliens.

Yeah, pretty much. So that, but that is ultimately what they said. Yeah, but here's the thing though. They did see that this was the fact that people were sighting these UFOs and it was all over the papers. The craze was a bad thing and dangerous even because the Cold War is heating up

like we were talking about. The Soviets have been known to secretly exploit the American psyche. That never happens anymore, of course. No. They don't do anything like that. Well, it's like you said, this was the Cold War. That's right.

They were known to do this kind of thing and they thought this is a perfect opportunity for the Soviets to come in, fake reports about UFOs, get everyone distracted, worked up into a frenzy. And they start asking them questions about pulsating and throbbing. And they said, and not only that, but the Soviets, I read their papers

or I have them read to me and they don't have any reportings of UFO sightings. So they're clearly, if there are any, they're keeping a lid on it. And this is our problem that they can exploit. We can't do the same back to them. Right, so all the Soviets had to do would be come in and be like, UFOs, UFOs.

Basically like shouting, fire in a crowded theater, which is illegal, of course, as everyone knows. That's right. So this is a problem. This is like with the way the CIA thought. This is something that they need to do something about. So they decided to basically undo that Cold War hysteria and panic.

Yeah, but they were in a pickle though. Because they're supposed to be tamping down this thing that they feel like they shouldn't even be investigating to begin with. Right, they're denying that something even exists but continuing to investigate it. Right. So what I was saying is they decided to say,

okay, we need to get rid of this Cold War hysteria. We need to kind of take the air out of this weird phenomenon in American culture. And they decided to do that by exploiting America with a public relations campaign. That's right, very, as you say, Bernaysian. And they said, hey, call up Walt Disney. Yeah.

And they really did. They thought, you know, we're gonna get this out in the media, we're gonna create this propaganda that's gonna sweep the nation on TV and in movies and in newspapers, debunking all this stuff, showing like, hey, this is how you explain this stuff. Right, saying like, here's this report. Yeah.

And here's the scientific explanation for it. Right. And that they consider that would be very powerful. And I think they're right. Yeah, just basically priming America's pump to where if you're having a water cooler conversation and bring something up about a UFO, there are five people there to say,

didn't you see that thing? Like it's weather balloons. People love doing that. Oh, sure. And if you can arm people with that, they will do it every time. And that actually is a pretty good plan for tamping down UFO hysteria.

It's a great plan. They also decided, maybe one of the less great parts of the plan to surveil and keep tabs on UFO groups for anti-American stuff, because this was during the McCarthy era, of course. So everybody was doing anti-American stuff if they weren't painting their white picket fence. Yeah, and I was, you know, I mentioned Disney

and we both laughed, but that was not a joke. They actually did think about, and who knows, maybe they got in touch with Disney about making some propaganda pieces to help them out, because they had done that before. Chip and Dale originally started out as UFO investigators, but it just kind of, one thing led to another.

They worked on propaganda pieces before. There was one called Donald Gitz Drafted, a Donald Duck propaganda film. Sure. And they said it never came to fruition, but it would not surprise me if they didn't poke around a little bit. Right.

Like in earnest. Donald Gitz Drafted did, I think that was the one that got released. Oh yeah. You mean like the UFO one. Yeah, like it wouldn't surprise me if they really did have an official meeting and Disney just said, no, like we're not gonna get involved.

They're like, but we have this idea about psychic children, but I guess it's kind of pro-psychic really. I wonder what the message is in Escape from Witch Mountain. I haven't seen it in so long. I'm sure there's some very clear message that as an adult, you'd be like, this is what I was taught? Yeah, I mean, I saw both of those. Didn't the rock recreate that or remake it?

I think so, but I did not. Recreate makes it sound like he just did it in his head in his living room or something. He recreated that after dinner one night. Right. I really think he was in that, a remake. No, I think you're right. I never bothered.

Oh, I didn't either. I like that guy though. Oh, the rock is great. I mean, I don't go see his movies much, but he seems like a good dude, right? He does seem like a good dude. You have a sense for these kind of things. Yeah, I've been told.

There was one TV show, there was a CBS show called UFOs, friend, foe or fantasy. It's a great name. And is this the one that Cronkite? Oh, okay, I didn't know if that was a separate one. Did I write this or that poorly? It's part of the same sentence. No, I know.

I just, I couldn't tell if it was me. It was my eyeballs. Okay, because it says it's in the same sentence narrated by Walter Cronkite. Yes. Okay. No, you did great. All right.

Thank you for reassuring me. This was in 1966, and this was largely over the Michigan sightings. Yeah, we'll talk about those in a little bit. Yeah, just a capin in that. But it was big enough that they brought Cronkite out. Cronkite. You know who I'm talking about.

Sure, Walter Cronkite. That's, he's a legend. You turn him upside down and shake him. He won't come out of the cup. So, but in that documentary is very much a pro-skeptic anti-UFO documentary where they followed the Robertson panel recommendations of saying, here's this amazing report of the sighting.

Right. Here's how it's explained. Here's another sighting. Here's how it's explained. Don't you see now that UFOs are actually really just kind of something, they're not alien? It's fantasy. They called it friend, foe, or fantasy.

They should have just called it UFOs, fantasy. Right. Because that was the upshot of it all. So that Robertson panel report, there's something else that was really interesting about it. It had a very surprising knock-on effect years later. So the panel was impaneled in 1952. I think the year of that UFO fever outbreak.

And its proceedings and its recommendations stayed classified until 1975. Yes, after Blue Book was gone. Yeah, years after it was gone. So I'm sure they figured like, oh, it's fine, whatever, just release it. But here's the thing. Up to that point, up to 1975,

as far as anyone in the American public was concerned, the CIA had just remained quiet on the whole thing. It was all US Air Force, CIA had nothing to do with it. And so all of a sudden this Robertson panel comes out and it's not only their own report, but they also mention an earlier CIA panel that had basically the same conclusions

that showed that very much the CIA was involved in this and that they had covered it up. And to people in 1975, it gave the alien conspiracy theory a real shot in the arm because it showed, no, the CIA was definitely investigating this and they covered it up. So how can we trust anything that anybody says about this? Yeah, covering it up to begin with just made the cover up.

It was a cover up. Yeah, it made something that wasn't a cover up, a cover up. Yeah, exactly, by covering it up. And fueled all sorts of conspiracy theories. That's how it works. That's just how it works. The US government, probably any government, will never ever learn, but that is just how it works.

That's right, there was another report declassified in 98 where the CIA said around the mid-1950s, they started observing planes that could fly at high altitudes. They started creating them. Yeah, well, it said observing. So I guess they were just observing what they created. Man, come on.

You can't take everything I say literally. And we're talking about, remember earlier, I kind of teased about the fact that the Soviets might have these spy planes. That's because we had spy planes. The U2 spy plane, very much top secret at the time. Yeah, it's like that old adage. When you point in the sky at the Russia's spy plane,

you got three fingers pointing back at your spy plane. That's right. It was very much top secret, like I said, and it could go up to 60,000 feet, which is three to five times higher than any commercial plane could fly at the time. And yet commercial pilots are seeing these things and reporting on them.

Well, yeah, because they were silver at first. They weren't painted the cooler black color. It's a later on, I guess with the touring models that they started to pump out there. And they were very reflective. So at sunrise and at sunset, these things would cast these weird lights and commercial pilots,

because they didn't know this was a thing. They would say, hey, there's something going on way up above me. Or people would see them from the ground. Yeah, flying really fast, really high, looking like fire. Yeah, because this started, I think test runs in the mid-1950s.

So that coincides with a lot of these sightings. Yeah, so this CIA memo that was declassified in 1998, basically said, by our estimate of that 701 unidentified reports of the 701 reports that remain unidentified in Project Blue Book's files, our U2 and SR-71 test flights can probably account for about half of those. Right.

Which whittles that number down dramatically. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break and come back and talk about the return of Heineck, right after this. ["Hail to the Chief"] Welcome to Star We Should Know. 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. 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 vapor, 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. 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, okay, 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, 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, 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 podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, oooo, ow, ooooo, ooooo, ooooo. Chuck, this is going so well. Thanks.

I'm really impressed. Good. So, Hi Nick. Uh-huh. You said he returned, but really he never went anywhere. Yeah, that's true. He's still plodding along, doing his thing. Started out at Project Sine.

By this time it's Blue Book. It's like us with this place. Yeah. How many times has it changed hands? Yeah. A million. Same old show, though. We're still here.

We're like the hynics here. That's right. Of how stuff works. So with the years, however, hynic himself seems to have changed. And he changed probably earlier than he made it public that he had changed. But he later said, you know what, everybody? I actually think that these UFOs are a thing. At the very least, there's some stuff we can't explain,

and we should be investigating them way more scientifically than we are. And that really flew in the face of the public face that he had, which by the time he came out and said that, had become something of a laughing stock at the behest of the Air Force. Yeah, like what the change was is Repelt left in 1953. And he was the dude that kind of had it running like a legit investigatory body. He left, and then hynics says it basically just became a PR device. And the stats prove it out.

It was the unexplained case rate of up to 25% that we talked about. After Repelt left, that went down to 1%, which is just an insult, even if you're a skeptic, that's an insult. Right, because again, they would use anything that they could think of, including planets that weren't even visible in the sky at the time. There's very famously one where I think there was a sighting in Oklahoma, I believe. Yeah. Oh, the 1965?

Yeah. There was the Oklahoma State Police, Tinker Air Force Base, and a meteorologist in Oklahoma who was using weather radar at the time, all independently tracked four objects, one of them on radar, and hynic in the Air Force who were doing Project Blue Book, representing Project Blue Book, said it was Jupiter, which is not a good explanation for four objects that are both visually sighted and show up on radar, because Jupiter doesn't show up on radar,

and it certainly doesn't show up as four fast-moving objects. Yes, and Jupiter wasn't even visible in the night sky on that date. Right, so this definitely is a really good example of what hynic was having to come out and say to the public toward the end of his camel's backbreaking. Yeah, and here's the thing, is he was still slightly skeptical, I mean, I don't know about slightly skeptical, he was still a skeptic, I guess, but his whole beef was, and he says this as a direct quote, he said, everything was negative and unyielding in their attitude,

everything had to have an explanation, and I began to resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, I thought they weren't going about it in the right way. Right. So that was the deal, the Air Force was just sort of an obligatory stamp of, not true, it was this, and he was like, well, I don't necessarily think it's an alien saucer either, but can we investigate it and get a real explanation at least? Yeah, that was definitely his thing. And then the other thing was that one through line that has kept skeptics interested in this

is credible observers reporting incredible, unexplainable things. That's right. So those two things, the Air Force irking him in the way that they were carrying out the investigation, and these credible observers actually caused him to undergo a conversion. There's a debate over whether it was a slow conversion or a quick conversion, some people suspect that he was actually a lifelong believer, and that he just kind of kept it under wraps, but even after he underwent this conversion, which has been estimated to have happened around 1960,

he kept it, he kept quiet, as a matter of fact, for years. And he didn't want to stake his personal reputation, his professional career, all that stuff, on just coming out and being like, hey, everybody, the Air Force is lying to you, especially considering that the general public by this time had completely bought into the idea that the Air Force was just blatantly and clumsily trying to cover up knowledge of UFOs and their reality. Yeah, he said he was kind of waiting for the big one, right? Like something so irrefutable that he could actually really go public with it. All right, well, let's talk about the swamp gas in Michigan.

This is a March 1966, very famous case that was siding over several days or hundreds of people that reported glowing objects hovering and flying around Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then a bunch of towns along the countryside between Toledo and Detroit, same thing, 87 students at Hillsdale College in Michigan, and they all said the same stuff, is that we've seen these objects with red, white, and blue lights. One family, instead of UFO, landed on their farm. Right. I don't know about that one, but you never know.

Yeah, the college students might stretch credibility a little bit, some of them. But it was a big national story, Heineck went there, and it was basically a frenzy, so much so that he had trouble getting interviews with the witnesses as the official representative, because the press was all over it. Right, yeah, the press were eating up all of their time, he couldn't interview them. But he finally did, and he held a press conference, and at the press conference, he said, it's possible some of the sightings may have mistaken swamp gas for UFOs. Yeah.

And in this guy's defense, he said some, he didn't say all. Right. He wasn't dismissive about it, it was just something he said. But the press took it, and it converted it into all. Basically, the headlines read, Heineck dismisses sightings as swamp gas, and that was that, like he had basically said, it was all swamp gas. Everybody knew that scores and dozens and possibly hundreds of people across Ohio and Michigan hadn't all seen swamp gas.

Right. And that was a preposterous explanation, especially if you laid it on the whole thing. Yeah, Johnny Carson even had an astronomer on to basically refute the swamp gas theory. Yeah, there's a headline, Air Force insults public with swamp gas theory. That was in like a legitimate newspaper. Yeah. So it was a ridiculous thing that got, it was a dumb thing to say, but I think he said it, not realizing that it was going to become the explanation, and it was going to make

him a further laughing stock. It just so happened that that swamp gas thing was the last straw that broke Heineck's back. Yeah, it broke his back, and there was a senator out of Michigan named Gerald Ford. And he said, I want to demand a congressional hearing. They said, who are you? He said, I'm Senator Gerald Ford. I'm going to be president one day. Yeah, you'll see.

I'll fix you good when I'm president. They said, how are you going to be president? You're a senator. He said, well, it's complicated. You'll see. So he demands this hearing, and they held a hearing the following month, and this is when Heineck really got a chance to kind of publicly out himself as a convert and said, my recommendation, Senator Ford, watch your step, is UFO sightings should be investigated

by scientists and not the military, and this was music to the ears of the military in a lot of ways. Yeah, they said, he said it finally. Yeah, great. They said, yes, you're absolutely right. We should have somebody scientifically investigate this. And the Air Force, for its part, saw an out of being in this UFO investigating business that it didn't want to be in in the first place, that in some way, Heineck had just opened

the door for them. So they said, yeah, we agree with Heineck. You guys should totally get some sort of scientific study going, and I don't know if it was Congress that hired them or if the Air Force did, but either way, a committee led by a physicist named Edward Condon out of University of Colorado. Go buffaloes. Yeah. And they took up the task of figuring out whether UFOs actually were a thing or not

and deserve scientific study. Right. So this is a three-year study in the end, and the objective was to really take it seriously as an academic study. And they did that, right? No, they didn't. It was really just a smokescreen to get the Air Force out of this business once and for all, because Condon basically, and there was a bit of a drumbeat in the public of like,

you're wasting our taxpayer money. There were some people that thought this was super worthwhile, but most people saw it as like, why is the Air Force wasting their time with this stuff? I would guess that would have been William F. Buckley's position. Yeah, probably so. So yeah, there were some people, especially people in the Air Force too, are like, this is a dumb thing to do. This is a dumb waste of time.

So Condon said, okay, I am possibly the only person on the planet who's in a position to get the Air Force out of UFO investigations. I'll do a little wink, wink, nudge, nudge, ask a few people if it pulsated or throbbed, and then we'll just release a report that says no, and that's exactly what they did. In January of 1969, they released the Condon Report, which was respectively 1,439 pages long. Yeah, but this quote from Condon though, in 1967, it is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business.

My attitude right now is there's nothing to it, but I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year. So that's so smarmy. It really undermines that 1,439 pages. Really frankly, whittles it down to about 50, just with that one quote. So the Condon Report basically says, hey everybody, our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that

further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. And the weird thing is Chuck, is I agree with him wholeheartedly. We didn't learn anything except about ourselves from investigating UFOs all these years. Nothing that we know about. Okay. I'll give you that. Except for toasters.

Did that come from UFO tech? That's what some people say. Oh really? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a UFO believer, one of the big things people point to is this boom in technology that came after World War II around about the time the Roswell crash happened.

Gotcha. And they point to Wright Patterson and say, well, we learned a lot from this and we started making microwaves and tang and all sorts of stuff, ended up on the moon. Those aliens were touching their bread and we got to get it on this. I like the real version of it where that guy had a chocolate bar, Percy, I can't remember his last name. Oh yeah. Remember he had a chocolate bar in his pocket and melted when he got too close to a microwave.

He's like, let's start making popcorn with this thing. Man, I forgot about that guy. Percy something. We're going to call him Percy Sledge. Okay. I was just about to say that. Were you? I was.

Nice. Let's do it. Let's take a break here and we'll tell you about what happened with Project Blue Book right after this. Okay. Welcome to Starfish and North War. 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 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? Don't 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. 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, okay, 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. Uh-huh. 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. All right. Project Blue Book closed. This is, Prince was killing me, man. December 17th, 1969. It was officially closed.

The airport sent out a fact sheet and said no UFO has ever been a threat to our national security. They don't recognize any technological developments. There are no extraterrestrial vehicles. And if you're a ufologist, is that what it's called? Ufologist. Ufologist, then you think it's just all one big lie still. Yeah.

There's, there's another documented sighting. Here's the thing. With all these documented sightings, it's like, yes, people did say this. Right. That's all that means. Yeah. So it's, it's really tough to kind of like as it coming from like the stuff you should know way to be like, well, to contradict this official report.

Yeah. Here's this other, you know, thing that we should be skeptical of, but there is, there was something that happened at a Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana in 1967 where allegedly ten of our nuclear warheads were suddenly taken offline while this unidentified object was hovering overhead and that the people who were tasked with watching the warheads were all reported on this and it was documented supposedly and that the Air Force's fact sheet thus that this was never a threat to our national security was a flat lie. That's right.

Yeah. And then they, Project Blue Book and all of the other projects that came before it investigated over 12,000 sightings, 701 remained unidentified. If you go by that number, if you listen to the military, like you said, half of those were U2s or Blackbirds, which is like what, 350 or so. But even still, okay, so there's 350. That's a lot. Okay.

But other people say no, it's even more than that. Right. Exactly. That's one of the official investigations and you didn't even investigate the one that I saw, buddy. Right. A lot of that stuff goes on. That's one.

Yeah. And that's actually evidenced in the number of sightings that increased after Project Blue Book. So in 1965, I believe, there was 886 reported sightings as part of Project Blue Book. Okay. In 2014, there were 8619 and in 2018, there were 3236. That was a slow year. So a lot of people say their force wasn't actually investigating a lot of these.

Yeah. And granted, this is, you should know this comes from private groups and citizens who have developed these groups for reporting, like the National UFO Reporting Center, because it's not codified now by the military. So citizens have done this. Right. So take that 8600 number with a grain of salt. But at the same time, it's not necessarily that these groups are drumming up sightings.

Oh, sure. There may even be more because at the time in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the American public generally knew if you saw something, you would contact your local Air Force base. Right. I wonder how many people know who to contact if they think they see something now. I have no idea. I don't either. I would just drive up to Dobbins and knock on the front gate.

They'd be like, come inside forever. Yeah, exactly. One of the other things, one of the other reasons that people say, you know, the unidentified number is actually way higher than 700 is because if you take those cases where they say it was Jupiter, it was a weather balloon, it was some stupid thing we just came up with, those cases go from identified to actually unidentified. Right. And so that number increases even further.

Project Blue Book will never die, friend. No, it will not. And something else won't ever die is Heineck is the person who developed the very famous Close Encounters rating scale. If you've seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, highly recommend it first of all. Sure. Great, great Steven Spielberg film with the great, great Richard Dreyfus and Terry Garr

for God's sakes. Oh, she's in it? Oh, man, she's so good. I miss her. So the first kind is, and you get one point. It's a rating scale for the believability of a sighting. Yeah. I just love the point thing.

Right. I got two points. So you get one point if you see a UFO within 500 feet, not bad. Second kind is two points, of course. That is a physical effect happens, which is like in Close Encounters, when he's on the railroad tracks, his headlights start going berserk and his truck shakes and the crossing gate on the railroad track goes up and down. I wonder if there'd be two points for each of those things or two points for the experience?

I don't know. Because I mean, you're just running those numbers up if it's two for each one. It blinked again. It blinked again. Right. And then finally, the third kind, the old three point line, that is when you see an alien or interact with an alien, and obviously in the film, that is when Richard Dreyfuss at the end walks up into that spaceship and takes the hand of the aliens.

And probably like the most unbelievable, it's a pretty old movie. And it's called the third kind. Sure. So the most unbelievable part of this whole thing is that Heineck went from the guy who was saying it was a weather balloon, it was this train pilot saw Jupiter, even though Jupiter wasn't even the sky right then, to the guy who literally wrote the book that founded ufology. Yeah.

What's the UFO experience colon, a scientific inquiry? Yeah. He just completely basically switched sides and said, there's a lot of stuff that we can't explain. Here's all these, you know, all this experience that I have investigating these things. Let's go forward and figure this out. I don't want to be a cynic, but I wonder what salary he had as a private scientist. He was a citizen for years and years doing this, being the face of this.

Do you think he was like, it's pretty good money? Maybe. And then when the time was up, he said, you know what else makes good money, writing you a book. You can write some books. Maybe. From what I can tell, he's a respected person in the field, in a lot of fields actually. I didn't get anything, because whenever, you know, when we research something, if somebody's

like that, somebody's out there sniping them, I don't remember this really coming up. The only thing I saw that was somebody throwing shade was the idea that he had been a believer all along. Right. And that he was actually faking as a skeptic. But he was a pretty believable fake skeptic. That's right.

And here's the deal though. Things did not stop. There was a classified memo that's not classified any longer from October 1969, just before a blue book was terminated, that basically revealed that like, hey, we're going to still investigate stuff. It's not part of blue book anymore, but here's how we're going to do it and what we're going to do. Like here's the process.

Isn't that astounding? Yeah. I mean, not really. But I mean, there was a memo that was sent out after blue book, right before blue book was shut down saying, don't worry, we're still going to have procedure for reporting this stuff and investigating it. They have to. It's just not going to be public.

Right. And Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader at the time, he had this program, it was all over the news, where what was it called? The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, because I guess Harry Reid thought there's something out there. For sure. And we need to look. It was a pep project of his.

That's right. You know, both Carter and Reagan claimed to have seen UFOs. I think I did know that. I knew Carter. Oh, of course Carter. I didn't know about Reagan. I don't think. Yeah.

Really? Oh yeah. We talked about that. I think we did live at Comic-Con, didn't we do UFOs? On UFOs. Yeah. I'll bet that's what we're talking about. This was better.

I agree. I think. I agree. This feels more like real. Yeah. Well, if there's anything unreal it's being at, actually South by Southwest. Oh, was it? Yes.

Okay. No comment. But this stuff still goes on even though that project from Harry Reid was shut down supposedly, or shut down in 2012. People involved say, no, we're still doing it. We're still doing that stuff. Right. And here's the thing.

When that came out, this is 2017, the guy who ran that program came out and told everybody about it. The New York Times reported on it, used all this breathless stuff, like really jumped to conclusions with the facts. And then other people started reporting on that and exactly the kind of reporting that was going on in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s about UFOs just continued again in 2017. And this is just probably how it's always going to be.

Yeah. And one of the big things was this 2004 sighting in San Diego from two, I think, Navy pilots. Yeah. And then they released the footage just a couple of years ago in 2017. As part of this New York Times article. Yeah. They released the video footage. And you can go watch it on YouTube, it was released in December of 2017.

I mean, you can see this flying saucer and you can hear these pilots, these trained Navy pilots. What the heck? Yeah. They're like, look at it, bro. He actually said, bro. Did he? I must not have the volume up.

Part where he calls them, bro. They describe it as a 40 foot long tic-tac. And then afterward in subsequent interviews, one of them said it accelerated like nothing I've ever seen before, and I have no idea what I saw that day. Sure. Saw the newest spy plane. From the future. Who knows?

Well, that's it for Project Blue Book, everybody. I'm sure we left some stuff out. If we did, let us know, especially if you're a ufologist, we want to hear from you. And since I said we want to hear from you, that means, of course, it's time for Listener Mail. This is just a little shout out about a couple of references that Brad and Sacramento likes. Okay. Thanks for everything over the years, guys.

I had to write in to acknowledge Chuck's Striper reference in the Nuclear Semiotics episode. It had me laughing. It took me back. I discovered Striper in the late 90s, which is pretty late for Striper, and they were kind of a joke in my circle of friends, most of them who had grown up involved in the church. To hell with the devil has been my favorite. Was that the name of their album?

I think so. Or maybe it was just a song. I said, no, they had an album called The Yellow and Black Attack. Sure. I had these in my record collection. No, I know. I don't anymore. You lie.

I wish I did. I'm surprised you haven't gone back and got them. It'd be a fun party joke. Sure. Just see how long it takes people to pick up on it. I would love to hear about Chuck's experience seeing them live. Well, I'll go ahead and tell you. I was into it when I saw them live.

Like Black and Yellow spandex? Sure. Yeah. The drummer played, he was set up sideways. I remember that was interesting. Like he was turned perpendicular to the stage, to the crowd? Yeah. Like the drum set was facing the side of the stage.

Why? Well, I guess because he would sing and the microphone was to his left facing the audience. But it still doesn't make sense. No. I don't know why they did it. There's a million ways you can put that microphone that's easier than turning the whole drum kit. No, I totally agree.

That guy liked his abs is what it was and he wanted you to like his abs as well. Maybe. I don't know. If I'm not mistaken, the drummer was the brother of the singer, Michael Sweet. I'm pulling this all out of my hind end. Out of your heck. So Josh, my favorite reference of yours was a while ago. I don't remember all the details, but it had something to do with the scene from Harry

and the Henderson's when Lithgow was trying to get Harry to go back into the wild. Yeah. Do you remember what you said? Yeah. I was just describing how he like punches them in the face and says, go. But I don't remember what that was in reference to. It wasn't that long ago. I do remember that.

No one remembers that. You guys have a way of making personal connection with your listeners and I can really appreciate that. Thanks for keeping things PG because I love to listen with my kids. That is Brad and Sacramento. Yeah, man. That's kind of the point now where I feel weird cursing. I had to get used to it on movie crush.

Cursing? Mm-hmm. And then it's now it's the second nature. Sure. Has it become weird on stuff you should know to not curse? No, no, no. There's a dividing line. Oh, bicameral, huh?

Yep. Nice. Good girl. I'm just a big dumb animal. No, no. No, it takes a lot of verb and grit and juge to be able to curse here and not curse there. Or the reverse. Yes, I've always been really good at it because of nieces and nephews and just I was always

hyper aware and still am about being in public and like people being around that I might offend. Right. I don't want to be that guy. That's good, Chuck. Yeah. Well, if you want to congratulate Chuck on this amazing sentiment of his, you should follow us on social media.

You can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out all of our social links there. Or you can send your congratulations directly to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.