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Captain Edward Ruppelt and his Air Force Project Blue Book teams. The final report of this blue-ribbon panel was kept in the classified files for thirteen years and was not released to the press until 1966. In that report, these scientists, some of whom later became recipients of the Nobel Prize, Ananl.-~4. declared: ...The Panel noted that the cost in technical manpower effort required to follow up and explain every one of the thousand or more reports received through channels each year could not be justified. It was felt that there will always be sightings, for which complete data is lacking, that can only be explained with disproportionate effort and with along time delay, if at all. The long delay in explaining a sighting tends to eliminate any intelligence value.... The result is the mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication with material quite irrelevant to hostile objects that might someday appear. The panel agreed generally that this mass of poor-quality reports containing little, if any, scientific data was of no value. Quite the opposite, it was possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in ‘nocturnal meandering lights.”” The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or might be potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for deemphasization made itself apparent.... The panel suggested a program for ‘‘debunking”’ UFOs and system- atically destroying the mystique that had grown up around the subject. “Such a program,”’ the report stated, ‘“‘should tend to reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.” AS part of a plan for deemphasizing the sightings, the Air Force files were closed to newsmen and researchers for several years, and military Personnel were forbidden to discuss UFO material with outsiders. This een fe neton A abs nate. 26 OAR? aba 222 wat La atin a wee te move inspired the cries of “‘Censorship!”’ that are still bandied about in the cultist circles. The phenomenon was much bigger than the U.S. Air Force, and it proved to be impossible to play down or explain all the sightings. Air Force public relations were ineptly handled, and some Air Force officers made incredible tactical blunders, such as telling reporters that airline pilots who saw flying saucers were drunk at the time and trying to explain some sightings as stars that were not even visible in the sighting areas. The UFO enthusiasts were quick to pounce on such careless explanations and used them to reinforce their allegations of official censorship. 260 / Operation Trojan Horse