The astronomer who became science's most famous skeptic was one of six members of the 1966 O'Brien Committee, which judged Project Blue Book scientifically hollow and urged universities to investigate. The study it set off ended official UFO research instead.
On 3 February 1966, six scientists gathered for a single day to decide how the United States should handle its UFO problem. Among them was a 31-year-old astronomer named Carl Sagan - years before Cosmos, before he became the most recognizable scientific skeptic of his generation. The panel’s verdict was blunt. The Air Force’s UFO investigation was too thin to count as science, and the country needed universities to take the subject seriously.
That recommendation would echo for decades, and not in the way its authors intended. It set in motion a university study whose 1968 conclusion - that UFOs held nothing of scientific value - gave the Air Force the justification it needed to shut its investigation down. The push for rigor, in other words, is what ended official U.S. UFO research for more than 40 years.
By the mid-1960s, Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s long-running UFO investigation, was under strain. A run of high-profile sightings, and the ridicule that followed the Air Force’s “swamp gas” explanation for a 1966 Michigan case, had Congress asking whether the program was serious. In response, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board convened an “Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book,” chaired by University of Rochester physicist Brian O’Brien.
Its members, according to the committee’s own report reproduced in the later Condon study, were O’Brien, Launor Carter, Jesse Orlansky, Richard Porter, Willis Ware - and Carl Sagan. They met once, and their report ran only a few pages. It concluded that in the 19 years since the first modern UFO sighting “there has been no evidence that unidentified flying objects are a threat to our national security,” while faulting Blue Book as too under-resourced to do genuine science.
Its central recommendation was specific: that “contracts be negotiated with a few selected universities to provide scientific teams to investigate promptly and in depth certain selected sightings of UFO’s.” The idea was to give the phenomenon the one thing Blue Book had never had - real scientific scrutiny.
The Air Force acted on it. Several institutions, including Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, declined the assignment. In October 1966 the University of Colorado accepted a roughly $325,000 contract for an 18-month study, led by the eminent physicist Edward Condon.
The Condon Committee’s report, delivered in 1968 and released publicly in January 1969, landed in the opposite spirit from the panel that had called for it. Its general conclusion, as the report put it, was that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” and that further study was unwarranted. Within months, on 17 December 1969, the Air Force cited the Condon findings and terminated Project Blue Book.
According to the CIA’s own declassified history of its UFO involvement, the Condon verdict ratified a hands-off posture the government had leaned toward since the secret Robertson Panel of 1953, which had recommended that agencies quietly play the subject down. The effect reached well beyond one closed program. As we have written about why serious scientists spent decades steering clear of the topic, the Condon report became the semi-official reason UFOs were treated as beneath scientific attention.
Sagan’s presence on the 1966 panel is the detail that catches people off guard, because it seems to contradict the debunker they remember. It does not. He never endorsed the idea that UFOs were alien craft; he argued that the reports deserved calm, unbiased study and that most of the heat around them came from emotion on both sides.
He said as much to Congress. At the House Committee on Science and Astronautics’ 1968 symposium on UFOs, Sagan laid out a position of studied neutrality: “I do not think the evidence is at all persuasive, that UFO’s are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin, nor do I think the evidence is convincing that no UFO’s are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin.” He argued the phenomenon warranted modest attention, but that scarce research money was better spent on planetary exploration and radio searches for signals from other civilizations.
That is the quiet irony of the O’Brien Committee. Its scientists asked for more inquiry, not less. Yet the study they set in motion produced a verdict that made investigating UFOs a professional risk, and the pressure that had built through the great sighting waves - like the 1952 radar-and-jets scare over Washington - was answered by closing the door rather than opening it.
The documents are still public, sitting in the appendices of the report that used them to end the debate. Read now, six decades later and in the middle of a new government disclosure push, the 1966 committee reads less like a footnote than a warning: how a question gets studied can shape the answer as much as the evidence does.
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