Donald Keyhoe
Retired Marine aviator and writer (1897–1988) whose 1950 article and book 'The Flying Saucers Are Real' launched the idea of a government cover-up.
1950 CE · 38.91, -77.04 · status: claim
The account
Keyhoe's article in True (January 1950) caused a sensation, and the book sold over half a million copies. He became director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in 1957, building it to about 15,000 members. In January 1958 CBS cut his microphone during a live broadcast after he called UFOs 'machines under intelligent control'. He was forced out of NICAP in 1969. An NEA story of about 1957 quotes him: 'The real mission of NICAP is to get the Air Force to open up its secret files on saucers'. Haines's CIA history records that Keyhoe and Leon Davidson pressed the Agency in 1958 to release the Robertson report, and that the CIA refused.
The sceptical view
Critics noted his pulp-fiction background, sensational claims (such as structures on the Moon that were optical illusions) and NICAP's poor finances; no 'silence group' he alleged was ever documented.
Connections in the atlas
- "Flying Saucers Are Real" (True magazine)
- Donald Keyhoe
- James E. McDonald
- The Flying Saucers Are Real
- Edward J. Ruppelt
- Donald Keyhoe and NICAP
- The Coolidge tube that seemed to change weight
- The 'gravitator' patent and the Biefeld–Brown effect
- Naval Research Laboratory and the S-48 gravity expedition
- Project Winterhaven
- Tests in Paris for SNCASO
- The 'gravitics' boom and the Electrogravitics Systems report