The Condon Report
A University of Colorado study of UFOs, paid for by the Air Force and led by the physicist Edward Condon, with results out by 1968. It found that UFO research had added nothing to science.
After congressional hearings on UFOs during the mid-1960s, Air Force money paid for a study headed by the physicist Edward Condon at the University of Colorado, according to Origins, a history site from Ohio State and Miami universities. The group became known as the Condon Committee and had its results out by 1968.
Condon's conclusion was that 21 years of UFO study had added nothing to scientific knowledge, and that more extensive study was hard to justify on the hope of advancing science. National Geographic adds that the study found no evidence of UFOs coming from other worlds and put most sightings down to natural phenomena or hoaxes. Origins says congressional and Air Force leaders then moved to close down Project Blue Book, which National Geographic says ended in 1969.
The study drew charges while the report was being written. Critics called it a sham, saying Condon had settled his conclusions before it started, the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology records, and several UFO groups pulled their support. According to Wikipedia, an article by Fuller, a journalist sympathetic to UFO witnesses, in Look's May 1968 issue laid out the dispute and called the project a "$500,000 trick". Condon answered that the piece was full of falsehoods.
Ufologists reading the report pointed out that many of its cases had no explanation assigned. J. Allen Hynek attacked it in 1972 in his book The UFO Experience and accused the Air Force of incompetence in its handling of UFO reports. A year later he started the Center for UFO Studies.
"Fuller in the May 1968 issue of Look, that presented interviews with Saunders and Levine, and detailed the controversy and described the project as a "$500,000 trick."[17] Fuller was a journalist identified with those who found UFO sightings credible, the author of a 1966 work on a sighting.[18] Condon responded that the article contained "falsehoods and misrepresentations."[19] Scientific and technical journals reported the controversy."
- Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, Section I: Recommendations and Conclusions, Edward U. Condon, University of Colorado (1968/1969), NCAS internet edition
- What we know from decades of UFO government investigations, National Geographic
- The Air Force Investigation into UFOs, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, Ohio State University and Miami University
- Condon Report, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, via Encyclopedia.com