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was the only quantitative study ever produced by anyone. Many dismissed Special Report No. 14 as ‘‘another whitewash,” because the basic conclu- sion of the study was that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial origin and no suggestion that an advanced technology was involved. When I carried out my own statistical studies using thousands of reports from the 1960s, I was startled to discover that my findings merely verified the material in Special Report No. 14. It was embarrassing, at first, to realize that an objective examination of the evidence proved that the UFO enthusiasts were wrong and the Air Force was right. Sensible research must be dictated by this basic precept: Any accept- able theory must offer an explanation for all the data. The paraphysical hypothesis meets this criterion. The extraterrestrial hypothesis does not. The UFO enthusiasts have solved this problem by selecting only those sightings and events that seem to fit the extraterrestrial thesis. They have rejected a major portion of the real evidence for this reason and, in many cases, have actually suppressed (by ignoring and not publishing) events events that point to some other conclusion. Once this process of selection began, the problem became more confusing and the mystery more mysterious. The UFO publications were filled with selected sightings, and professional writers preparing books and magazine articles sifted out the best of those sightings, unaware that a major part of the real data was being deliberately ignored. After the 1955 explosion of paraphysical information, ufology slipped into a Dark Age of confusion and bewildering misrepresentation. The Air Force paid only token attention to the phenomenon, explaining it away successfully for years as natural phenomena. The UFO enthusiasts be- came convinced of ‘Air Force suppression of the truth’’ (which had been started by Ray Palmer in an 1946 editorial which contended that ‘‘the governments of the world’? were consciously suppressing information about the “arrival of space ships”), and a considerable part of the UFO literature published after 1955 was devoted to wild-eyed speculations about why the government was trying to keep UFOs a secret from the public. Because the professional writers and researchers had deserted the subject, the general quality of UFO literature hit a new low, most of it filled with pseudoscience and amateurish speculation. The factions within the UFO camp spent most of their efforts on feuding and fussing with the Air Force and with one another. There was very little actual research into TIA enntenen 26 all Lateennn INES 2nd 1NLL As part of the hype for Ruppelt’s 1956 book, the Intelligence Com- munity in Washington, D.C. held a well-publicized symposium for four 36 / Operation Trojan Horse UFO matters at all between 1955 and 1966.