Diana Palmer Hoyt
Whatever one may think about the material reality of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), myriad reports of UFO sightings exist and are well documented in the literature of the study of UFOs. This field is widely known as ufology. The history of UFO sightings and their socio-political context and consequences constitutes the broad subject of this study. It provides a rich site for analysis of how scientists address, both publicly and privately, anomalies that appear to pertain to science. The case study I have chosen to explore is a study of UFO sightings, the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, commissioned by the Air Force in 1968 in response to an unprecedented wave of UFO sightings in America. The Air Force selected Dr. Edward U. Condon, a plasma physicist of the University of Colorado, to chair the study. In this thesis, I answer four questions: (1) why the Air Force chose Edward Condon to chair the Committee which produced the report; (2) how the report was a product of the history of the UFO phenomenon and the cultural and intellectual context of its times; (3) how “social intelligence”–or the perception and transmission of information through cultural institutions–shaped Condon’s scientific definition of the UFO problem, and (4) how social intelligence trumped “scientific method. in both the framing and resolution of the UFO problem.
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