The CIA's January 1953 Robertson Panel put the word "debunking" in quotation marks in its formal recommendations. Five physicists in four days designed the public posture the government has used on UFOs ever since.

I spent eight years in the Navy as an Operations Specialist, four of them running the Fleet Air Defense Identification Zone in the Eastern Pacific. The job was contact resolution. I've been working through the declassified UAP record the way I'd work a watch, by reading what the documents actually say. On July 2, 1952, Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, a career Navy photographer, filmed about a minute of bright objects moving in formation over the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah....