Dear friends, good afternoon! We continue to lift the veil of secrecy over declassified and classified materials on unidentified flying objects. Today we turn to the investigation conducted on the Black Vault site, known for its exposure and the release of secret government documents on paranormal topics.
Over the course of twenty-two years, from 1947 to 1969, the United States Air Force initiated three UFO research programs known as Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, respectively. The most famous to the public is undoubtedly the last of the projects. However, it is less known why these projects were terminated.
Their curtailment, at least officially, was triggered by a controversial 1,500-page report prepared by the so-called Condon Committee, a US Air Force-funded group that worked at the University of Colorado from 1966 to 1968 under the direction of physicist Edward Condon (hence its name)., studying the cases of sightings of unidentified flying objects and decided whether it is worth continuing to spend money and human resources on research of this phenomenon.
Edward Condon.
But over the years, something very strange and suspicious has happened to this report: part of the report has been removed by the government agency responsible for distributing it.
The Condon report has never been classified, and it is now distributed online primarily through the Defense Technology Information Center (DTIC) - if you know how to find it, of course. Our colleagues at The Black Vault, which specializes in declassified documents obtained from FOIA (Free Information Act) requests, made this report publicly available in 2018, noting that it was 70 pages short.
Section with missing pages highlighted in the table of contents of Condon's report.
Promotional video:
No official answer
An attempt by Black Vault staff to access the missing pages in the DTIC was unsuccessful. Apparently, the original document scanned by the agency did not originally include the aforementioned astronaut observation section.
It should be noted that there are several copies of Condon's report in text form on the Internet, and most of them are missing the missing pages. Thus, the point is not that the missing section was not freely available, but that the government decided to remove it from the official copy.
Finding such copies outside of the official US government resources requires a search in dark places on the Internet; in fact the Google results only give six results (see screenshot). These versions are copies created by the National Capital Area Skeptics over twenty years ago, after contacting directly with the University of Colorado.
Despite this, the original copies of the report distributed through the DTIC - submitted as complete - remain incomplete.
Searching for the missing pages
Black Vault began searching for original pages in December 2019. The most logical place to look was the University of Colorado, where the study was conducted. However, emails and any attempts to contact were ignored.
And so in June 2020, a complete copy with missing pages was discovered in the archives of the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), an agency under the Department of Commerce that was formed after World War II. According to their website, the agency is currently "providing support" to its partners to "store, analyze, organize and aggregate data in new ways." The archives consist of a large database of technical reports that have existed privately for decades but are now open to the public.
The Condon Committee report found on NTIS is a complete scanned original with all pages, confirming the opinion that they are indeed the most interesting. In Chapter 6, three astronauts' observations are labeled as "unexplained":
View or download these pages in PDF format from the Black Vault website: Condon's Lost Report Pages [70 pages, 3 MB]
Astronaut observations
The Condon report states that the three observations by astronauts James McDivitt and Frank Bormann presented a mystery and had no adequate explanation.
The report says that McDivitt, a member of the Gemini 4 mission, observed a "cylindrical object with a bulge (protrusion)", it is even mentioned that four days later, NASA photographed this unknown object. However, the space agency has released only a few photographs that have been retouched - cropped and enlarged - so that the object the astronaut saw does not hit them.
Astronaut James McDivitt.
McDivitt decided to explain everything in a simple way, saying that perhaps it could be an artificial satellite. This was taken into account by the researchers of the Condon group, who, however, were unable to identify any artificial satellite as the object of this observation.
The report also mentions surveillance during the Gemini 7 mission. The object Bormann saw was called a "ghost." When Mission Control tried to determine if it was one of the engines, the astronaut confirmed that there was also a rocket in sight, making this impossible. The "ghost" has been classified as a real unidentified object.
Astronaut Frank Borman.
The section on UFOs and astronauts ends like this:
Metadata
Metadata or information hidden in certain files has been verified for Condon's report files. Black Vault compared NTIS (full) with DTIC (partial).
It turned out that the NTIS version was scanned six years earlier than the first one stored in the DTIC. Also, the software application used for this task was different, so there were probably two different manual / physical scans, with the last one deleting 70 pages.
But the mystery is not how these pages disappeared, but why. Of course, one, two, or even a few missing pages of a 1,500-page document is something that can happen by accident, especially if it was created half a century ago.
But the removal of 70 pages dedicated to a specific topic was probably done on purpose. What for?