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148 Given the Cold War, continued military intelligence control of the investigation seemed natural. Jacobs observed that this may have inhibited the scientific community from conducting its own study. If the Air Force had released the UFO data and encouraged all scientists to look at its files, commented Hartmann, the UFO mystery probably would have been clarified after a few months of scientific and public excitement.” From 1947 to 1964 the controversy raged within the confines of special interest groups—the Air Force on one side and private UFO groups on the other. The press, public, and Congress became involved only sporadi- cally. Nonetheless, the urge to explain generated a voluminous literature, ranging from Donald Keyhoe’s best-selling books claiming UFOs were extraterrestrial visitors to Philip Klass’ debunking works arguing that they were misinterpretations of known phenomena. Meanwhile, hoaxes were damaging the credibility of legitimate UFO research. The Clarks later observed that the intellectual vacuum left by science was all too quickly filled by the unscrupulous purveyors of fantasy.”! The motion picture industry began to capitalize on public interest in UFOs in 1951, portraying aliens as both benevolent and dangerous. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” presented an attractive humanoid from a utopian planet who landed his saucer in Washington, D.C. to warn Humankind against its warlike tendencies. This film, sometimes described as the first to treat the idea of extraterrestrials seriously, showed the alien as both ethical and potentially threatening—and able to walk through human cities without being recognized. Another 1951 film, “The Thing from Another World,” portrayed the survivor of a saucer crash as intelli- gent but ready to destroy humans who stood in the way of his seeding the Earth with his offspring. Both of these visions of aliens remain with us today. A scientific panel convened by the CIA in 1953 recommended that national security agencies strip UFOs of the special status they had been given and the aura of mystery they had acquired. During the same year, skeptical astronomer Donald Menzel became the first American scientist to publish a book on UFOs. He dismissed as ludicrous the idea that UFOs represented extraterrestrial intelligence. People who accepted this idea, he insisted, were lunatics, cultists, religious fanatics, or, at best, frightened and confused.” This is strikingly similar to criticism of early rocket propulsion advo- cates. After David Lasser’s book The Conquest of Space was published in 1932, physicist H.H. Sheldon said that “all rocket enthusiasts are mental defectives.””* Hynek thought that it was destructive to sneer at reported sightings. “Ridicule is not part of the scientific method,” he said at a symposium, “and people should not be taught that it is.”** In a modern parallel, some The UFO Controversy