UFOs: A New Look: A Special Report by The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)

Review:
UFOs: A New Look is a 46 page A4 report, originally released in early 1969 ahead of the Condon Committee report. The authors are Richard Hall, Ted Bloecher and Isabel Davis; the editors are Donald Keyhoe and Gordon Lore, Jr.

It is divided into eight sections: The UFO Revolution, Extraterrestrials - Suggested Motives and Origins, Vehicle Pacings and Encounters, Close-Range Sightings;Structural Details, Scientific Support;Congressional Hearings, Landings;Physical Traces, Are There UFO Occupants?, The Colorado Project.

It is quite good. However, cases conspicuous by their absence are the cases of Betty and Barney Hill, Snippy the horse (and related cattle mutilations), Herb Schirmer, John Reeves, Carroll Wayne Watts and Antonio Villas Boas.

NICAP became somewhat irrelevant in the late 1960s because of the strident views of its members in debunking or dismissing all UFO sightings involving occupants. In UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon committee went wrong, David Saunders states that NICAP "shuns occupant and contactee cases like the plague." Saunders also quotes from a NICAP report that stated that the case of Snippy was "neither a UFO case nor especially mysterious". APRO meanwhile was conducting more thorough, objective UFO investigations, rendering NICAP somewhat obsolete.

The publication of UFOs: A New Look might have been an attempt by the NICAP hierarchy to belatedly make up ground lost to APRO, and overall, it is quite good. There are some decent enough sighting reports and various theories. There is a theory that alien intelligence might be "a cancer of purposeless, technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as it has swept across our own planet"; a case investigated by a psychiatrist, Berthold Schwarz, of a man who suffered three months of fatigue, anorexia, muscle weakness and chills after being chased in his car by a UFO; another case of a UFO chasing the car, where the occupants suffered ringing in the ears, light-headedness and an uneasy feeling as if someone was trying to communicate with them; a UFO that issued a high-pitched whine that caused a dog to try to cover its ears with its paws and cattle to blot into cattle sheds until 30 mins after the UFO had departed; a case investigated by Leonard Stringfield where a UFO was observed by policemen hovering over a creek bed, causing small trees to look as if they'd been pressed down as if by a heavy weight and splintered tree limbs to appear on the ground; the case of a UFO observed by police to land on a road in Pretoria, South Africa, leaving a burn mark behind; plus eleven reports involving UFO occupants, the most famous of which being the 1959 Papua New Guinea Sighting. Several pages are devoted to the Condon Committee fiasco and to the 1968 UFO Congressional hearing, with some cases analyzed by James McDonald included as an appendix.