Topic
Official programs, reports, laws and hearings, from Project Blue Book to AARO and the National Archives. 366 events, newest first.
GovernmentDec 1978
After a Freedom of Information Act suit by the Arizona group Ground Saucer Watch, the CIA released roughly 1,000 pages of UFO-related records. The group said they showed agency interest in UFO reports long after the CIA said its study ended in 1952; the claims were the group's reading.
Government27 Nov 1978
At a UN Special Political Committee meeting on Grenada's UFO item, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, speaking with Grenada's delegation, said the phenomenon's scope was not recognized, and Jacques Vallee urged scientific study while saying there was no evidence UFOs were visitors from space.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
GovernmentJun 1978
France's CNES UFO study group GEPAN, overseen by a council of senior scientists, presented its first results from 1977-1978 case inquiries in a June 1978 report to that council. CNES later said the findings showed cases worth further study; founding head Claude Poher left in October 1978.
Photo: Edal Anton Lefterov, CC BY-SA 3.0
GovernmentFeb 1978
Sen. William Proxmire gave NASA's proposed radio search for extraterrestrial signals his Golden Fleece award for wasteful spending. The funding was then removed from NASA's fiscal 1979 budget; a House subcommittee held the first congressional SETI hearings that September.
Photo: United States Senate Historical Office, Public domain
Government1 Feb 1978
NASA's Information Sheet 78-1 said NASA would answer public UFO inquiries sent to the White House but ran no UFO research program, and would analyze only bona fide physical evidence from credible sources, following its December 1977 reply to the President's science adviser.
Photo: Vargklo at English Wikipedia, Public domain
Government1978
After the 1977 Petrozavodsk reports, the Soviet Union added two parallel studies of anomalous phenomena to its state research plan, one under the Defense Ministry and one under the Academy of Sciences. Participants later said most cases were explained by rocket launches and balloons.
GovernmentDec 1977
On July 21, 1977, Frank Press, science adviser to President Carter, wrote to NASA Administrator Robert Frosch proposing a panel to check for significant new UFO findings since the Condon Report. About five months later NASA answered that neither a research effort nor a symposium was justified.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Government7 Oct 1977
In a General Assembly address, Grenada's Prime Minister Eric Gairy urged the UN to set up an agency or ad hoc committee to study unidentified flying objects, said he had seen one himself, and noted Grenada had put the item on the session's agenda.
Photo: White House, Public domain
Government20 Aug 1977
Voyager 2, the first of NASA's two Voyager probes to launch, carried a gold-plated copper record with images, natural sounds, music and greetings in 55 languages, meant to tell any spacefaring finder about life on Earth. Voyager 1 followed weeks later with a copy.
Photo: NASA/JPL, Public domain
Government1 May 1977
France's space agency CNES set up GEPAN, a unit in Toulouse to collect and analyze reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena, with engineer Claude Poher as its first head. It became SEPRA in 1988 and GEIPAN in 2005, and still operates.
Government19 Sep 1976
A U.S. Embassy Rabat cable relayed Royal Gendarmerie reports of a silent, luminous disc or tube seen from Agadir to Fez early on Sept. 19, 1976, and King Hassan II's request for information. A satellite watcher later matched it to a reentering Soviet rocket stage.
Photo: Christian Lambiotte, CC BY 4.0
Government30 Jul 1976
The labeled-release experiment on NASA's Viking 1 lander returned a positive reading for gas released from nutrient-dosed Martian soil. NASA concluded it reflected soil chemistry, not life, after no organics were found; its designer Gilbert Levin long argued it detected life.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Government25 Jul 1976
NASA's Viking 1 orbiter photographed a mesa in Mars's Cydonia region whose shadows looked like a human face; NASA's 1976 caption called it an illusion. NASA says geologists attribute the landform to natural processes, and Mars Global Surveyor imaged it at ten times the resolution in 1998.
Photo: Viking 1, NASA, Public domain
Government1976
The Air Force placed its Project Blue Book UFO files in National Archives custody in 1975. After witness names were redacted, the records opened to public research in spring 1976 and are read today on 94 rolls of microfilm (T-1206).
Photo: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0
Government1976
During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter, who had filed a report of his own 1969 sighting, said he would make government UFO information available to the public and scientists. After taking office he did not follow through, citing possible defense implications.
Photo: Jack R. Thornell, Public domain
GovernmentFeb 1975
J. Allen Hynek's article 'The UFO Mystery' in the February 1975 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin urged police to pass UFO reports to his Center for UFO Studies in Northfield, Illinois, which kept an unpublished toll-free hotline for police and official agencies.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Government1975
Colorado Sen. Floyd Haskell repeatedly urged the FBI to investigate cattle mutilations in western states. FBI records show the Bureau declined, explaining it had no jurisdiction without evidence of interstate transport. Its file also holds clippings on helicopter and UFO theories.
Photo: Unknown, Public domain
Government1975
During Colorado's 1975 wave of cattle mutilation reports, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took up the cases at the governor's direction and in December reported 203 suspected cases, attributing all but 11 to predators. An Elbert County sheriff disputed some findings.
Photo: Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 4.0
Government21 Nov 1974
The House and Senate overrode President Ford's veto to enact amendments tightening the Freedom of Information Act. UFO researchers later used the law in suits such as Ground Saucer Watch's, which led the CIA to release hundreds of UFO documents in 1978.
Government26 Mar 1974
Physicist Edward U. Condon, a Manhattan Project veteran who was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947-1949, died in Boulder, Colorado.
Photo: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Public domain
