David
Saunders was a professor of psychology
at the University of Colorado when the Air
Force grant was proposed. He
became involved in the Colorado
Project, the so-called independent civilian
scientific research effort on UFO reports led by Dr.
Edward Condon, and thus known as the Condon
Report. He
was extremely interested in the UFO subject and immediately
volunteered to be part of the project team. Saunders was
probably somewhat in violation of one of the criteria
for project members in that none were supposed to be actively
involved with UFO organizations. He was a member of NICAP.
He
thought that this effort would be an unbiased evaluation,
but soon discovered an internal memo which proved that
the conclusion was already decided in the minds of Edward
Condon and his project assistant, Robert Low. Because
he dared protest publicly on the bias of the latter and
showed the internal memo to the press, he and Dr. Levine,
co-discoverer of the infamous memo, were sacked under
the motive of "incompetence". Subsequently,
half of the members of the group resigned, as a protestation
against the obvious bias of the project.
With
hindsight, one could say that Saunders let the UFO community
down in one significant way. It was his responsibility
primarily to champion the "Case Book" of great
old cases, which Bob Low had happily agreed to, despite
Condon not liking it. This would have produced many anchor
points in the final report difficult to deny by nay-sayers.
Instead, Saunders focussed himself almost entirely on
statistical analysis and no one did the Case Book at all.
Thus, the final report was severely impoverished.
Soon
after Saunders was fired from the Condon
study group, he wrote a much ignored book,
UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee
Went Wrong, in which he detailed the reasons
why Condon and Low decided to ignore legitimate UFO cases,
and how their conclusion was formulated in advance in
a biased manner. He also detailed why other scientists
on the project determined that UFOs are likely to be vehicles
from outer space, and how they were fired or their conclusion
ignored.
As
member of the "Condon" group, Dr. Saunders
had established the UFOCAT
computer database of UFO reports, stored using a coding
system he devised. He continued this work after the end
of the Colorado
Project with the help of the J.
Allen Hynek Center
for UFO Studies (CUFOS)
until 1980. It had more than 106,000 entries. UFOCAT
was not maintained during some ten years after 1980, but
it has now been reactivated by Dr. Donald Johnson, a former
associate of Dr. Saunders and CUFOS
board member.
References
•
UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon
Committee Went Wrong - The inside story by an ex-member
of the official study group, book by Dr. David
Saunders and R. Roger Harkins, World Publishing, New York,
1969.
• "A spatio-temporal
invariant for major UFO waves", paper,
proceedings of the 1976 CUFOS
Conference Center for UFO Studies, Evanston,
Illinois, 1976.
Sources:
http://ufologie.patrickgross.org/bio/saunders.htm
http://www.nicap.org/photobio.htm
