Project Blue Book — the U.S. Air Force’s “official” UFO investigation — ran from 1952 to 1969, supposedly to catalog and analyze sightings of unidentified flying objects. On paper, it was a sober scientific effort to separate weather balloons and swamp gas from anything truly out of this world. In tinfoil-hat mode, though, it looks more like the government’s first real attempt to control the UFO narrative: thousands of reports quietly funneled into military labs, eyewitnesses intimidated into silence, and evidence whisked away under the guise of “national security.” They claimed to have found nothing of interest — yet conveniently, the program was shut down just as technology (and public curiosity) was catching up.
