Battelle Memorial Institute is a private nonprofit research and development organization headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. It was founded in 1929 and named for Gordon Battelle. Its researchers helped turn Chester Carlson's dry-copying concept into xerography, the technology behind Xerox, and made nuclear fuel rods for the submarine USS Nautilus. Battelle now manages or co-manages several Department of Energy national laboratories, among them Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, Brookhaven and Idaho.

Battelle entered UFO history through its work for Air Force intelligence at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In late December 1951, Edward J. Ruppelt, who was reorganizing the Air Force's investigation of unidentified flying objects, met Battelle staff to put the effort on a more scientific footing. The institute devised the standardized sighting questionnaire used by Project Blue Book, and from late March 1952 its analysts coded existing reports onto IBM punched cards, recording about 30 characteristics for each case.

Four Battelle analysts sorted some 3,200 cases as knowns, unknowns or insufficient information, and a case counted as unknown only if all four agreed. The study, completed in 1954 and released by the Air Force in October 1955 as Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, placed about 22 percent of cases among the unknowns, including 35 percent of those rated excellent against 18 percent of the poorest. Its summary nonetheless called it "highly improbable" that the reports represented technology beyond present-day knowledge, and the Air Force's 1955 announcement presented it as showing that UFOs did not exist, citing an unknown rate of about 3 percent. Researchers including physicist Bruce Maccabee later argued that the report's conclusions did not follow from its own statistics.

The study was still unfinished when the Robertson Panel met in Washington in mid-January 1953. A January 9 letter from Battelle engineer Howard Cross to the Air Technical Intelligence Center, addressed to Ruppelt's attention, asked that "Project Stork", the letter's name for Battelle's work, and the center agree in advance on what could be discussed there. It also proposed an observation program in a well-equipped area such as New Mexico, to be tested by flying ordinary aircraft and balloons without the observers' knowledge. Jacques Vallée, who wrote about the letter in his journals under the code name "Pentacle" for its author, has called it a scandal; the Center for UFO Studies and the French researcher Gildas Bourdais read the proposal as a standard calibration method rather than a plan to stage sightings.

The Department of War's sixth PURSUE release on September 18, 2026, included a recording and transcript of Ruppelt's 1952 presentation, which NewsNation reported contains information on the Air Force's use of Battelle as a contractor. Richard Dolan's channel has promoted claims that Battelle's 1950s materials research was linked to debris from the 1947 Roswell incident and to nitinol, a shape-memory alloy named for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory where it was developed, and online posts tied the institute to alleged non-human remains; no released record supports those claims. Battelle's documented place in the field remains Special Report No. 14, whose unexplained residue critics and defenders of the Air Force still debate.