Menzel couldn't accept the fact there might be extraterrestrial visitors. Since there couldn't be, he knew that the answer had to lie elsewhere. This is not exactly good science.
In the paper he presented to the symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on December 26 and 27, 1969, he castigated Dr. James McDonald for what he considers to be mistakes in McDonald's research, his beliefs about UFOs, and for not reporting everything about a case so that he, McDonald, can present a persuasive argument for his opinions.
Menzel, writing about the Chiles and Whitted case, suggested, "He accuses me of glossing 'over the reported rocking of the DC-3.' Nonsense! There was no mention of such 'rocking' in the official report."
The statement by Menzel is interesting for a couple of reasons. As noted in the chapter on the Chiles and Whitted case, the newspaper articles do report that Chiles mentioned a buffeting of the aircraft. But, when I searched the statements made by both Chiles and Whitted to official investigators, including those they wrote themselves, mentioned nothing about the turbulence.
The only conclusion we can draw is that there was no turbulence. Where did McDonald get the idea. Clearly he did not have access to the official file, as did Menzel. So McDonald's mistake was that he didn't see the official file, and that wasn't his fault.
On the Salt Lake City case Menzel, who insisted that it was a sundog, wrote, "During all this time ground observers reported no motion whatever."
Remember, Menzel clearly had access to the official files. I read them before writing the sections here, and, as mention, I selected parts of those official statements because they proved that the people on the ground did say they saw the object move. Menzel was clearly wrong here. He had to know the truth, but he spouted the party line none the less.
So, given that, who engaged in the worst "science?" Menzel or McDonald. Clearly it was Menzel. He had to know the truth, but glossed over it in his rush to solve the sighting.
All this leads to still another question. Remember the date of the symposium was late December 1969. The Project Blue Book files were supposedly classified. How did Menzel know, in 1969, what was in the files? The answer is that he had read them. He was working for the Air Force. He was consulting for the Air Force. That explains how he knew what was in the files, and it explains that why, out of all the people who had written books about UFOs, including former head of Project Blue Book Ed Ruppelt, only the galleys of Menzel's books were in the files.
It also tells us something about the make of the Air Force team who investigated UFOs. Menzel was a rabid debunker. In a letter to me, he explained that all sightings could be explained, for the most part by misidentifications of natural phenomena, delusion, or conventional craft seen in unconventional circumstances. In all the other cases, the sightings were the result of "damned liars." For a scientist, he didn't have a very scientific attitude.
We can also see, in his handling of the Lubbock Lights case were his mindset was. While a persuasive argument can be made that the first of the sightings, by the professors on the porch, might be some sort of natural phenomena, such an explanation fails to explain the photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr. Menzel tried, as he had with other sightings, multiple explanations. This suggests, of course, that he doesn't have a clue and just wants to explain them away. When his multiple explanations failed to gain much attention, he decided, with no evidence whatsoever, that the photographs were a hoax.
That attitude was reflected by the personnel in Project Blue Book. Hector Quintanilla went out of his way to suggest solutions to sightings that were ridiculous. When police officers chased a glowing object from Ohio to Pennsylvania, he decided it was a combination of Echo I and Venus. He made his assessment based on a telephone conversation with a single witness, asked only a couple of questions, and had completed his investigation. Only under congressional pressure and orders from the Pentagon did he make the trip from Dayton, Ohio across the state.
The interview with the police officers was not an attempt to gather additional information. It was an attempt by Quintanilla to convince the witnesses that they had seen a satellite and Venus. He didn't seem to be interested in hearing how the object had been within a hundred feet of the witnesses, or how its illumination lighted the road under it. Quintanilla had "solved" the case, and solved it stayed.
What this tells, or rather confirms, is that the Air Force project was in the business of solving UFO sightings and not investigating them. It also tells us that an unidentified label was the kiss of death. The point was to reduce the number of unidentified cases to a point where they came statistically insignificant and that point could be made to the public. Air Force officials insisted that, with complete information, all cases would have been identified.
How can we be sure that this is the case? Remember the letter written by an officer about Air Force Regulation 200-2. He wrote, "…which essentially stipulates the following… to explain or identify all UFO sightings."
And, remember that Edward Trapnell, an assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force suggested finding a civilian agency to study the problem and then conclude it the way the Air Force wanted it concluded. One of the stipulations was that the civilian agency had to say some positive things about the Air Force's handling of the UFO question, even though, it is obvious to us, that their handling had been less than adequate.
We see then, after 1953, when the Robertson Panel had "studied" UFOs, and had made their recommendations of stripping the mystery from the phenomenon and of a public education, the emphasis shifted from investigation to explanation. Twist and manipulate the data until it was warped into a position that fit with what the Air Force wanted us to believe. They were the "authorities" on the topic. They had employed the best research techniques. And they had no "secret" information that would lead to other conclusions.
Yet, when we look at the files, those files that they must have believed no one would ever see, we learn that the situation is different than we were told. There were secret studies, some of which concluded that UFOs were extraterrestrial, there were cases in which the solutions were not consistent with the facts, and there were cases in which the Air Force should have investigated but never did.
The Air Force mission, or rather the public mission, was to investigate UFOs. That should mean they would be very interested in the photograph cases. Here was a report where they weren't confined by the eyewitness testimony. There was something that could be measured and analyzed. Here was something they could see. And yet, it seems that they had no real interest in pursuing some of the best of the photographic cases.
On May 11, 1950, Paul Trent, a farmer living near McMillville, Oregon took two photographs of an object that hovered near his house. The pictures of the disc-shaped craft have foreground detail in them. Neither Trent nor his wife attempted to make any money from the pictures. They have been examined time and again by experts. William Hartmann analyzed them for the Condon Committee and wrote, "The is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against fabrication."