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things reported could not possibly have any basis in fact," [13] he wrote. The Air Force, at least publicly, had dutifully fulfilled the debunking role that the CIA panel had so highly recommended, and Blue Book records are rife with examples of solid cases being given ridiculous, often infuriating explanations, sometimes by Hynek himself. Even as he became more aware of the contradiction in later years, Hynek said he did not want to was fight with the military and felt it was more important that he maintain access to the store of data at Blue Book, "as poor as they were." [14] In this vein, perhaps most famous is his "swamp gas" statement, made in 1966. For two days, over a hundred witnesses in Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, had seen glowing unidentified objects at relatively low altitudes, many of them near swampy areas. This quickly became a highly charged national news story, and great pressure was placed on the Air Force to solve the case as quickly as possible. Hynek was called to a packed press conference, one bordering on hysteria, as he described it, where he made the comment that the lights could have been the glow of something called marsh gas, a rare phenomenon that arises from the spontaneous ignition of decaying vegetation. The hostility he faced in the press and among the public for his "swamp gas" explanation was widespread, and the media ridicule he received is now legendary. This time, everyone seemed to recognize that the Air Force had gone too far and crossed an unacceptable line in its debunking. American frustration with the Air Force's inability to adequately investigate and address recurring UFO sightings had been building, and many now began to feel that the Air Force was not only incompetent but actually intent on covering up the truth about UFOs. Two well-known figures of this era-Major Donald Kehoe of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a leading civilian research group, and Dr. James E. McDonald, a senior atmospheric physicist from the University of Arizona— played critical roles in bringing credibility and knowledge to the UFO subject while challenging the approach of Project Blue Book. Following the publication of best-selling books and magazine cover stories about UFOs that year, public interest in Robertson Panel were directly implemented, but we do know that one of the Robertson panelists stepped up to the plate in 1966. Astrophysicist Thornton Page of Johns Hopkins University wrote to Frederick Durant, head of the National Air and Space Museum's aeronautics department— both men had been members of the Robertson Panel—claiming that he "helped organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel conclusions," referring to the two-hour special "UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?" hosted by the trusted Walter Cronkite. [15] The Cronkite show debunked UFOs from all angles with intense bias and false claims, such as statements that no radar or photographic evidence existed to support the physical reality of UFOs. It seems clear that someone must have been the CBS show around the TV the phenomenon was at its peak. We will never know to what extent the recommendations of the Robertson Panel