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149 critics of SETI also have employed ridicule, drawing on such UFO-related clichés as “little green men.” The 1950s produced the contactees, people who claimed that they had met aliens and had even been given rides in flying saucers. According to the contactees, space people (who looked like humans) came from planets free from war, poverty, or unhappiness. These angellike beings wanted to prevent war, stop nuclear testing, and help us build the kind of utopian society that they enjoyed. Some flying saucer clubs of the time were contactee-oriented, even though many contactee claims were disproved. People with little knowledge of the UFO phenomenon constantly confused the lunatic fringe with serious UFO investigators.” The rise of contactees and flying saucer movies came at the same time as increased secrecy in the Air Force’s handling of UFO reports. Although the contactees and the movie industry gave the UFO phenomenon public- ity the Air Force wanted to avoid, their focus on the sensational and fan- tastic lent credence to the Air Force’s denials of an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs. After an upsurge in sightings in 1965, the press, the public, the U.S. Con- gress, and the scientific community all entered the controversy. A contin- ued public uproar led congressmen (Gerald R. Ford among them) to hold the first open hearing on the subject in April 1966. Hynek’s testimony criticized the Air Force approach, calling for a panel of civilian scientists to determine if a major problem actually existed. A panel including Carl Sagan, concluding that no UFO case represented technological or scientific advances outside of a terrestrial framework, recommended that the Air Force contract with universities to study UFO sightings. The University of Colorado accepted the project, placing Dr. Edward Condon in charge. Condon released his committee’s report in January 1969. In his summary, which ignored or overruled some of his staff’s views, he declared that his study had found no direct, convincing evidence for the claim that any UFOs represent spacecraft visiting Earth from another civilization. He went beyond that to assert that the great distances and times involved in interstellar travel made contact between different solar systems impossible (a position shared by many SETI advocates). The Condon report did acknowledge that people who reported UFOs were normal, responsible individuals and that some sightings were difficult to explain by conven- tional means.”° As Hynek saw it, the Condon report confused the UFO problem with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The issue was not the validity of that hypothesis, but the existence of a legitimate UFO phenomenon regardless Condon the Denier Condon the Denier