I was reading American Prometheus and want to share some deeper digging on Edward Condon and the famous report.

In March 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee labeled physicist Edward Uhler Condon “one of the weakest links in our atomic security.” The charge was not espionage. It rested on his internationalist views, his resistance to military authority during World War II, and his membership in organizations later deemed suspicious. Scientific organizations at the time viewed the attack as political. That did not stop the consequences.

For years afterward, Condon endured loyalty hearings, subpoenas, and repeated security reviews. In 1954, Vice Presidet Richard Nixon publicly praised the revocation of Condon’s security clearance as a victory against “pro-Soviet” scientists. Even after multiple reinstatements, the process itself took its toll. Condon eventually withdrew his appeals, and his role in government defense research effectively ended. What makes his later career striking is not just that he survived this pressure, but how he seemed to adapt to it.

In 1943, Condon resigned from the Manhattan Project after only weeks at Los Alamos. He objected to General Groves’ extreme compartmentalization, arguing that physics depended on open exchange and that mail censorship and monitored phones made him ineffective. At the time, this positioned him as a defender of scientific openness, even at personal cost. That stance helped put him in Groves’ crosshairs for the rest of the decade.

After the war, Condon became a leeding voice for civilian control of nuclear research and international scientific cooperation. He helped shape the Atomic Energy Commission and argued that secrecy could not prevent nuclear catastrophe. These views made him influential, and also vulnerable. HUAC targeted him through guilt by association, not evidence. Although loyalty boards cleared him, the stigma stuck. By the early 1950s, the repeated investigations had exhausted him. Colleagues later noted that he was never quite the same.

Fast forward to 1966. The US Air Force was looking for a way out of UFO investigations without appearing anti-science. Project Blue Book had become an embarrassment, and public ridicule was mounting. The solution was an external, university based study that could credibly conclude that further research was unnecessary. The University of Colorado accepted the contract, and Edward Condon was named director.

An internal memo from assistant dean Robert Low made the strategy explicit. The project needed to appear objective to the public while signaling to scientists that it expected to find nothing. Staffing it with skeptics was described as “the trick.” When members of the research team later questioned this premise and pushed to examine the strongest cases, Condon fired them. The stated reasons were procedural. The effect was to enforce a predetermined boundary around acceptable conclusions.

The final report in 1969 was over a thousand pages long and included cases labeled unexplained. Yet Condon’s executive summary concluded that nothing of scientific value had been found and that further study was unwarranted. The Air Force used the report to shut down Blue Book. The National Academy of Sciences endorsed it. Within mainstream science, UFO research became professionally radioactive. The irony is difficult to miss. The man who once resigned over secrecy and authority now presided over a study critics argue was designed to foreclose inquiry. The tactics used against him in the 1940s and 1950s were now mirrored in how dissent was handled under his leadership. Instead of security clearances, the enforcement mechanism was professional ridicule. I did a longer writeup.