Gerald Ford's 1966 Call for a Congressional UFO Investigation

In March 1966, Ford sent a letter to the chairmen and ranking Republican members of the House Committees on Armed Services and Science and Astronautics, urging that one of the two panels open an inquiry into the rash of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects in Southern Michigan and other parts of the country. The source document states that Ford was not satisfied with the Air Force explanation of the recent sightings in Michigan, and he described the swamp gas version given by astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek as flippant.

That single word — flippant — captures why the Minority Leader judged the official response inadequate. The Air Force, Ford noted, had been checking such reports for years but had come up with nothing conclusive. For Ford, the problem was not merely the unexplained lights themselves but the quality of the government's answer to them.

He argued that a congressional inquiry…