The Robertson Panel and the Downgrade of Project Blue Book: Shaping Public Perception and U.S. UFO Policy

To the point

After the Washington, D.C. UFO sightings defense leaders worried the flood of reports could paralyze intelligence and that the Soviets might exploit the confusion, with H. Marshall Chadwell warning that a crisis could blur real hardware from phantom alerts, the New York Times noting that sightings degraded regular intelligence work, and the CIA launching a review of UFO data with Project Blue Book, followed by a panel led by H. P. Robertson that dismissed Air Force material and urged a public-perception campaign including a debunking effort and celebrity challenges and even police monitoring of civilian groups, a secret conclusion that later downgraded Project Blue Book to a public-relations exercise and created a strategy to discourage sightings and limit civilian researchers.