Donald Keyhoe: the man who made it a cover-up

Donald Keyhoe was a US Marine Corps major, a naval aviator, and by the late 1940s a working aviation journalist with contacts throughout the American military.

In January 1950, True magazine published his article arguing that flying saucers were real, that they were interplanetary, and that the Air Force knew and was concealing it.

It is one of the most consequential magazine articles ever published. Everything downstream — the cover-up as the organising idea of the entire subject — starts here.

What he brought

Credibility of a kind Adamski never had. Keyhoe was a service officer and an established aviation writer with real sources. He was not describing personal encounters; he was reporting on an institution.

And he was substantially right about the concealment, if not about what was concealed. The Air Force was withholding information, was making public statements at odds with its internal assessments, and did run investigations it did not describe accurately.

The 1958 broadcast

In January 1958 Keyhoe appeared live on CBS opposite an Air Force representative. He had submitted a script in advance, as required.

On air he departed from it, beginning to say that the Air Force position was about to change. His audio was cut mid-sentence. The network later said it was because he had gone off the approved script for reasons of broadcast policy.

It is a real event, on tape, and it did more for the cover-up thesis than any document could have. A man saying the government is suppressing this, silenced on live television, is an argument that makes itself.

The Robertson Panel

Keyhoe suspected an organised policy of dismissal. A document declassified after his most active years shows something close to one.

In January 1953 the CIA convened a panel of scientists chaired by H. P. Robertson to review the UFO question. It met for a few days and concluded that the reports posed no direct threat but that the volume of them could clog reporting channels in a crisis.

Its recommendations included a programme of public education intended to reduce reporting, and monitoring of civilian UFO groups — Keyhoe's own NICAP among the organisations named as warranting attention.

What he got wrong

He treated concealment as proof of the interplanetary explanation, and it is not.

Much of what the Air Force was hiding in the 1950s concerned its own limitations, its radar and interception capability, and its classified aircraft — things a service conceals routinely from adversaries and, in the process, from the public.

Keyhoe also pressed for congressional hearings for two decades and did not get them. The 1968 Condon Report, which he opposed, concluded further study was unwarranted, and Project Blue Book closed in 1969.