1950: The Year in Review
Thanks largely to Keyhoe, and despite all efforts by the Air Force and even the White House, UFOs became an important media issue for the first time in three years. 1950 was also a year of significant sightings by many trained airline personnel. It featured one of the best-ever photographs taken of a UFO, and the most striking motion footage to date. It was a year of continued – and seemingly unharassed – violations by UFOs over restricted military air space, including Air Force Headquarters and several key scientific sites. During the summer, intelligence personnel in the Air Force, Navy, and Army, as well as FBI and CIA staffers, were involved to some extent in the investigation of UFOs, while at the same time diligently hiding this fact from the public. Throughout the year, rumors of crashed discs and dead aliens pervaded the Air Force, reached the FBI, and even spilled over into the media. It was a year of several high-level conversations confirming interest and secrecy about UFOs, of various plans by the American and Canadian governments to track UFOs, and may have featured a crash and recovery of one.
A measure of control over the UFO problem slipped away from the Air Force during 1950. Other branches of the military and government showed greater behind-the-scenes interest, and the public showed nascent signs of independent thinking on the subject. Still, the problem appeared manageable, at least from a public relations point of view. The beliefs of people like Keyhoe and Scully were still a small minority, and during these years after the Second World War and the peak of the Cold War, most Americans held an almost worshipful attitude toward their military. But even a reverential and compliant public could only go along with the program as long as the UFOs themselves – whatever they were – remained in the background, as they had more or less done in 1948 and 1949. If 1951 proved to be as active as 1950 had been, things could be difficult for those managing the problem.