The UFO Story

Is the UFO phenomenon real? Yes.

Other than God, It is the greatest question we can ask of our existence on this planet.

In 1961 and informal conference was held at Green Bank West Virginia. It had been set in motion by the
buzz surrounding Astronomer Frank Drakes recent project Ozma, the genesis of the SETI program and
the attention given to the Cocconi-Morrison letter Searching for Interstellar Communications on the
21 cm hydrogen line, one of the fundamental tools in our search of the cosmos. It was to be an informal
conference without any public announcement. Its agenda would be to discuss the possibility of
communication with other worlds.

The conference was organized by the National Academy of Sciences, (NAS) Space Science Board and
would be attended by some of the sharpest minds in the world. The boards membership itself consisted
of two Nobel laureates with strong interests in the search for other life in the cosmos. Both Harold Urey
and Joshua Lederman were prize winners and as it turned out during the conference one of the
attendees, Melvin Calvin was notified he had won the Nobel prize for Chemistry while he was attending
the conference.

Cocconi and Morrison were to be there, Morrison had been one of the men behind the Manhattan
project and Peter Pearman who would head up the conference would become the head of CERN which
eventually gave us the Hadron Collider. There was also Bernard Oliver eventual National Medal of
Science winner and the man eventually chosen to head up the SETI project itself, Otto Struve whose
pioneering work in stellar rotation would lead the early searches for the first planets outside our solar
system. John Lilley the eclectic mind behind the communication with other species, Su Shu Huang fresh
from China and her work calculating the types of stars that may be habitable and large enough to have
allowed life to evolve. Frank Drake, the man behind the equation And Dana Atchley Jr, an amateur
astronomer with a keen interest in Drakes Ozma project. Oh yea and another guy you may have heard
of, Carl Sagan.

Some of the brightest thinkers assembled together and out of the box we have the drake equation, and
a Nobel laureate was named, in a room full of geniuses, this was a good start. Much of the agenda had
been spelled out in Drakes equation: how many stars are there, where should we look for them, how
many are capable of supporting life and for how long. And once we did find anyone out there should we
and how would we contact them.

This all took place in 1961; the US military and Intelligence communities had shut down all flow of
information on the subject of the UFO. They had officially rejected the idea that even in the smallest of
chances that life did exist outside our planet, the distances involved made it impossible for
communication, much less interaction with another world. Given the climate, people oddly were more
open to exploring the idea of other life as a reaction to the all or nothing attitude of the Government.
The universe, so large and we were just now beginning to really see it. We had to have others like us out
there somewhere, we were not alone, couldnt be. Those were the days, when you had the best minds
of the time, sticking their polite thumb in the nose of the status quo and asking the big questions. These
were the times that the world had aspired towards after the second war.

Today even more people by the numbers believe that we are not alone. Privately we can voice our
opinions and know in our hearts that we are not alone, privately. To ask those questions in a scientific or
public forum, much less build a proposal for a research project addressing any of these questions; will
get you laughed out of the room. This is nuts. This is the UFO story.