Project Grudge Conclusions: Military Personnel Make Lousy Observers

Just doing a bit of poking around in the Project Blue Book archives online, and I came across the table of cases examined by Project Grudge. Serious researchers have seen this before, of course, but it's interesting to note the breakdown and comments again just to put things into perspective. Debunkers like to note that official studies of UFOs found there was no value in UFO reports, but the USAF project contains wording that suggests otherwise.

To whit:

According to these findings, 78, or almost one-third, of the 237 incidents yet remain without an appropriate hypothesis for explanation. It is likely, of course, that with additional evidence that a number of those included in class 3a would be easily explained (some of them, probably, astronomically). There are, however, at least 48 incidents in which the evidence, if correct as given, does not fit any simple explanation, and a number of these were reported by presumably well-qualified observers.

(Project Grudge Report, Page 114 in the Maxwell Blue Book Files)

Categories 3a and 3b were labeled "Non-astronomical, with no explanation evident," and 3a was further noted as: "Lack of evidence precludes explanation," while 3b was: "Evidence offered suggests no explanation."

Category 3b, therefore, included cases for which there was significant information for positing an explanation, and not "Insufficient Information" as debunkers have sometimes claimed. But as the author of the report hinted, the only possible way to explain the cases was to suggest that the cases were not "correct as given." But then why include them in this second category at all, when category 2 was "Non-astronomical, but suggestive of other explanations" and these could have been put there? In other words, the reports had enough information content that if the UFO was a plane or balloon or star, it would have been listed as a possibility and not put in category 3b. Yet 3b made up 20 per cent of the total batch of UFO cases.

If debunkers are correct, then, at least 20 per cent of the (largely military) UFO witnesses were mistaken in their observations. But what does that say about the general reliability of military observers? One in five cannot be trusted to be good observers? It's long been conceded that pilots, both military and commercial, can make misidentifications of ordinary phenomena when reporting UFOs, but one in five? One would have to question every observation by military personnel, whether regarding a UFO or conventional military targets.