Dumbing Down a Phenomenon
By Don Ledger
FATE :: September 2006

A headline appeared in the Sunday edition of The New York Times on May 7, 2006 stating, “Relax, it’s just gas, not a UFO,” by Jack Grimston. It was a line story picked up from the Sunday Times of London, England. Because it had such a disparaging title The New York Times felt safe in running the piece though not usually disposed to printing stories that are concerned with UFOs, at least not in any positive sense. The same article was carried in many other newspapers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. This, and like-minded articles, was triggered by an Executive Summary report released by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) as the Condign Report, a 464-page report released on May 15 as a downloadable PDF file.

The Sunday Times article was in error. The gas in question was meant to denote plasma “gas” as causative for many UFO reports over the last half century. The Sunday Times and other newspapers made the mistake of taking the Condign Report’s Executive Summary as a definitive explanation of what was in the report.

A reading of the complete Condign Report soon made it clear that there was no MoD scientific study as reported in the paper. There was no panel of scientists, no exotic equipment, and no extensive re-investigation of witnesses and the UFO reports that had been in the MoD’s files in some cases for decades. In fact just one person assembled the study. His name was kept secret . . .