This week let us look at the decorated American Marine Corp officer and author Major Donald Edward Keyhoe (1897-1988) one of the pioneers in the fight to expose the truth about the UFO phenomenon. In 1950, Keyhoe published his first UFO book, Flying Saucers Are Real, which was an expansion of an article he wrote in the January 1950 issue of True Magazine. The article created a sensation and the book too was well received selling more than 5 lakh copies.
On July 19, 1952, more than 8 UFOs were seen over the skies of Washington DC, which cruised at a low speed of 100 to 130 miles an hour and then accelerated to fantastically high speeds. They passed over restricted air space including the White House and the Capitol building. They were seen by many and tracked by military radar for several hours. Whenever the UFOs crossed the restricted air space, fighter Jets were sent to intercept; when the jets closed in, the UFOs would accelerate and disappear.
This led to a massive media frenzy forcing the government to give an explanation. On July 29, 1952, General John Samford convened the largest press conference by the Air Force since the Second World War. He told the media that since 1947, the world has had around 2,000 UFO reports from all kinds of sources and that they had been able to explain most of them.
As far as the sightings over Washington DC, he tried to explain it as an aberration caused by temperature inversions…as in, layers in the atmosphere in which rising temperature affects radar performance. This interpretation was disputed by pilots who chased the UFOs, the radar operators who tracked them and the scientists who studied them. Many officers, pilots and radar operators from the Air Force who disliked its policy of lying about the UFO phenomenon passed on information to Major Keyhoe. Based on those interviews and official reports, Keyhoe wrote Flying Saucers From Outer Space in 1953. This book was appreciated for its accurate reporting of the UFO phenomenon.
In 1956, Major Donald Keyhoe co-founded the national investigations committee on aerial phenomenon (NICAP) whose main objective was to tear down the wall of secrecy surrounding the UFO phenomenon. It soon became the largest and most prominent civilian UFO research group in the US. Its board of directors included former CIA director Hillen Koetter and other ranking military officers and prominent scientists like James McDonald who was an expert in atmospheric physics.
With a well-represented NICAP organisation behind him, Major Keyhoe sought public congressional hearings on the subject. On January 1958, Keyhoe tried to use Senator John McCielllan’s sub-committee on investigations to start public congressional hearing on the UFO phenomenon, but all his
attempts were thwarted by the Air Force officials.
On January 22, 1958, Major Keyhoe was invited to participate in a live broadcast on CBS TV programme titled, UFO-Enigma of the Skies. The Air Force officials tried to use this broadcast to manipulate the minds of the American public, that there was no truth in the UFO phenomenon. Keyhoe tried his best to take the truth to the American public. But all his efforts were thwarted by the Air Force, who, while publicly claiming they were not censoring the show, even objected to Major Keyhoe quoting from government reports, and forced the network to cut out offending statements.
In 1969, Major Keyhoe was ousted from NICAP leadership by Colonel Joseph J Bryan who was followed by John Acuff. Both these individuals ran the organisation into the ground. By 1980, NICAP folded. Only later the truth came out that both of them were once in the employment of CIA.
(The writer is the Director of INSETS: Indian Society for Extraterrestrial Studies and also the author of ‘Accidental Apocalypse’)