David R. Saunders

David R. Saunders was a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado who became one of the most prominent insiders to publicly challenge the Condon Committee, the university-sponsored study of UFOs that produced the 1969 Condon Report. His later work on UFO data, including the UFOCAT catalog, made him a significant figure in the statistical study of UFO reports, even though his conclusions were disputed.

Role in the Colorado Project

When the University of Colorado accepted the Air Force-funded study on 6 October 1966, Saunders was named a principal or co-principal investigator alongside astronomer Franklin E. Roach. Edward Condon was the director and Robert Low the coordinator. According to Saunders's own account, reproduced by the Patrick Gross UFOlogy archive, he expected an unbiased review but came to believe the conclusion had already been settled. He pointed to an internal memo by Low that, in his reading, showed the outcome was decided in advance. Patrick Gross, David R. Saunders biography presents this view in full and is openly sympathetic to Saunders.

Saunders's statistical work was central to his position. He coded roughly 7,500 reports, with a target of 10,000, and argued that sightings lasting about five to fifteen minutes were the most informative. Very brief reports, he suggested, were more likely meteors or jets, and very long ones balloons or astronomical objects. He also compared the Project Blue Book and NICAP report samples and found that they overlapped only for heavily publicized cases, which he read as evidence that the two sources described different populations of sightings. These findings were not part of the Condon Report's published conclusions.

Dismissal and the book

In 1968 Saunders and electrical engineer Norman Levine publicly accused Condon of taking an "unscientific" approach. The project fired both men for alleged incompetence. Condon treated the charge as libelous and threatened legal action, and Saunders and Levine considered a libel suit of their own. Half the remaining group reportedly resigned in protest, according to the Gross account.

Saunders then co-wrote UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong with journalist R. Roger Harkins, published by World Publishing in 1968 or 1969 (sources differ slightly on the year). The book argues that Condon and Low ignored legitimate cases and that other project scientists had concluded some reports were best explained by extraterrestrial vehicles, only to be overruled. Saunders later wrote that it was "unfair and hardly accurate" to describe Low as a plotter or conspirator. The book was largely ignored at the time. A Physics Today review, which Saunders's critics cite, observed that the authors now believed at least a small number of UFO reports were genuinely unexplained.

The Condon Report, delivered to the Air Force in November 1968 and released in January 1969, concluded that further extensive UFO study was probably not justified. The Air Force closed Project Blue Book on 17 December 1969.

UFOCAT and later work

Saunders's most lasting contribution outside the controversy was UFOCAT, a computerized catalog of UFO reports that he designed around his own coding system. The database was maintained with the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and had grown past 106,000 entries by 1980. Work on it then lapsed for about a decade before it was revived by Donald Johnson, a former associate of Saunders and a CUFOS board member. Saunders also moved into industrial relations research at the University of Chicago and co-authored a 1976 CUFOS conference paper, "A spatio-temporal invariant for major UFO waves."

Assessment

Saunders is an unusual figure: a credentialed academic who challenged the scientific establishment's handling of UFOs from within, while also advocating for the possibility that some reports reflected something real. Sympathetic ufology writers present him as a whistleblower whose warnings were vindicated by the book's neglect. Condon's defenders and later reviewers regard the dispute as a partisan clash in which Saunders's statistical claims and the book's conclusions were not persuasive. Both readings recognize that the Colorado Project was a turning point in the public credibility of UFO research. Saunders's stance is therefore best described as contested rather than settled.