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but cleverly awaited the developments in the United States before funding it and giving it an official stamp of approval. In Boulder, Colorado, a group was finally being assembled with much fanfare, headed by Dr. Condon, a prestigious physicist close to retirement. The group had recieved a sizeable grant to ponder ufology, and its report was due in 1969. It would prove to be negative. In November 1966, when the Condon committee started gathering testimony from people who had done research into UFO cases, Dr. Hynek and I were the first scientists asked to come to Boulder to brief the group. We soon noticed that one of the administrators, Bob Low, was clearly the key decision maker on the team, although he had no science degree and seemed to have little interest in the matter. Yet there was a certain euphoric feeling in the room, a sense of embarking on a unique adventure. There was little passion in the press now; the Michigan swamp gas crisis had been largely forgotten. The problem was in the hands of the scientists, and it had become as dull as any venture that is in the process of being rationalized away by the academic mill. If the journey to the moon can be turned into the exasperating bore that modern technology has generated, there is no reason to expect that the same lack of interest will not settle over the UFO mystery once it falls into the hands of Big Science! (The first astronauts to die in orbit will probably die of ennui when they run out of buttons to push, digits to read out, and jokes with Houston about the football scores.) As early as February 1967, members of the Condon committee were privately approaching their scientific colleagues on other campuses, asking them how they would react if the committee's final report to the Air Force were to recommend closing down Project Blue Book. Not surprisingly, a few months later the work of the committee had come to a standstill. Field investigations were nonexistent. Questionnaires were sent out to witnesses, but only one assistant was aviable to encode the results for the computer file, where the bulk of the information was provided by the three thousand punched cards I had turned over to the committee. A minority faction of the group caused a crisis when it rebelled. After a series of incidents that Dr. Dave Saunders documented in his book, UFOs? Yes!, the team split into two factions. An early restricted memorandum discovered and published by the minority group provided evidence that the Condon committee had never intended to look seriously into the UFO problem. Publication of this document so outraged Condon that he fired the minority group and ran the project without any further consideration of the possible reality of the phenomenon. The files of the committee were eventually destroyed. One would think that they belonged to the scientific fraternity or to the public domain, since American taxpayers paid for the "research." Not so. When the project wrote its report the files were locked up by the University of Colorado in Boulder. They were later transferred to a private home and were burned shortly thereafter. The little town of Carteret lies on the western coast of Normandy, France, about twenty miles from Cherbourg. It is situated directly to the north of wonderful Mont-Saint-Michel, a monastery that, as legend goes, was built by the devil. On December 2, 1973, a very strange thing happened on the beach at Carteret. Two fishermen, Mr. G. Jean, forty-four, and his son Noel, eighteen, got up at 5:00 A.M. to retrieve their nets at low tide. When they arrived on the beach half an hour later, they saw a very bright object directly over the area where their nets had been spread. They walked toward it until they estimated they were about 150 yards away, and it appeared as an intense yellow "window," eight feet long and five feet high, emitting a cone-like beam directed toward the ground. The two fishermen were afraid and decided not to go closer. They tried to work without thinking about the object, but then it changed suddenly: the yellow light was turned off. Over the area where similar to the American one. The Russians made some moves toward the creation of a committee Destroying the Data The Second Coverup: Convenient Explanations