62d Military Airlift Wing History, 1969: Blue Book Ends at McChord AFB
A McChord AFB wing history records the end of Project Blue Book from the base's side: 12 local UFO reports in late 1969, none forwarded, and a base UFO officer still following AFR 80-17 because no order had come to stop.
What this record is
This is the history of the 62d Military Airlift Wing, a Military Airlift Command C-141 wing at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington, for July to December 1969. It was sent to Twenty-Second Air Force. The catalog names the historian, Irmgard R. Dennis, and the commander, Col Van N. Backman. The PDF has 426 pages and covers airlift missions, squadron inactivations, maintenance, budgets, base housing and community relations. It was unclassified, marked For Official Use Only, and that marking was removed in 2013.
It is in the UAP transfer because the base was the host for the local UFO program, and the history records how that program ended.
What it says about UFOs
The UFO content is about two pages of text, plus a chronology entry, an index line and one sentence elsewhere. The table of contents (page 19 of the PDF) lists a section called “Project BLUE BOOK (UFO)”. The chronology (page 41) records that on 17 December 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., announced that Project Blue Book, “the code name given to the investigation of unidentified flying objects”, had been officially ended.
The main section runs across pages 389, 391 and 393. It opens with Seamans’s announcement of 17 December 1969 and the reasoning behind it: the project could no longer be justified on grounds of national security or in the interest of science, and it did not merit further spending. An Air Force Reserve information office message reported that the decision rested on the University of Colorado report, a review of that report by the National Academy of Sciences, past UFO studies, and two decades of Air Force experience. The history summarises the Colorado study, directed by Dr Edward U. Condon and released in January 1969. It concluded that little if anything had come from 21 years of UFO study to add to scientific knowledge. The history also quotes the Academy panel’s view that “the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings.”
The local detail is on page 391. McChord had received UFO reports for years from citizens, radio disc jockeys and the news media. The number rose and fell with the weather, from none in the cold, rainy season to several as it improved and “numerous ones during the hot summer days”. The base UFO project officer since July 1968 had been Maj Kenneth DeCordova of Base Operations. Only reports that could not be explained locally went to Wright-Patterson, with information copies to the Secretary of the Air Force’s information office and to the University of Colorado. The base had received 48 reports in the second half of 1968 and the early part of 1969. From July to December 1969 there were only 12, and none of them was forwarded for investigation.
Page 393 ends the section with a small administrative twist. When the historian interviewed him on 8 January 1970, the project officer still had no official notice to stop accepting reports. He planned to go on following Air Force Regulation 80-17 until new guidance arrived.
One more sentence appears on page 355, under community relations. It says very few UFO reports were turned in that autumn, apparently because the weather was not yet good enough for viewers to stay outdoors and scan the skies.
Context
AFR 80-17 had replaced AFR 200-2 in 1966 as the regulation governing UFO reports. It was the rule under which bases like McChord screened sightings and forwarded the unexplained ones. The Condon Committee at the University of Colorado, set up that same year, gave the Air Force its grounds to close the program, and the closure of Project Blue Book followed in December 1969. This history is a record of that closure from the bottom up.
Status
The record contains no sightings, only counts. What it adds is a local view of the end of the Air Force’s public UFO program: how many reports one large base received, how few it bothered to forward, and how a base officer carried on under the old regulation for weeks after the Secretary’s announcement because the paperwork had not caught up. The weather pattern the historian noticed, with more reports on warm evenings, is the sort of pattern skeptics point to. Reports track how many people are outside looking up. The history does not say what the 12 reports of late 1969 described.