James E. McDonald
From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project
Dr. James E. McDonald (1920 - 1971) was an American physicist. He is probably best known for his research regarding UFOs. McDonald was senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics and professor in the Department of Meteorology, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Throughout the mid and late 1960's he campaigned vigorously in support of expanding UFO studies, arguing that UFOs represented an intriguing, pressing and unsolved mystery which had not been adequately studied by science. McDonald was one of the more prominent figures of his time who agued in favor of the so-called extraterrestrial hypothesis (or ETH) as a viable explanation for UFOs.
A dedicated and tireless UFO researcher and scholar, he personally interviewed over 500 UFO witnesses and uncovered many important government UFO documents. He testified before Congress during the UFO hearings of 1968. [1] Some Ufologists consider his presentation there the single best summary of the UFO evidence ever given. Another famous McDonald summary of the UFO evidence, called "Science in Default," was a critique of the 1969 Condon Report UFO study prepared for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was published posthumously in 1972 in "UFO's, A Scientific Debate," edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page.
Val Germann writes that "McDonald was a scourge of the complacent ufologists of his day. He blasted the Air Force, Hynek, Menzel, Condon and anyone else doing a second-rate job in the UFO arena. He was a first-rate intellect and a world-famous atmospheric scientist, this last very important since UFOs are mainly reported in the atmosphere, not in outer space. This put the astronomers (Hynek & Menzel) on the spot when they tried to challenge McDonald. He was in his field, they were not. This would often cause Menzel acute embarrassment."[2]
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Biography
McDonald was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota. He served as a cryptographer in the United States Navy during World War 2, and afterwards, married Betsy Hunt; they would have six children.
McDonald studied at the University of Omaha, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned his Ph.D. at Iowa State University. He taught at the University of Chicago for a year, then in 1953, he was invited to to help establish a meteorology and atmospherics program at the University of Arizona as a professor of meteorology. McDonald eventually became the head of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, but resigned as its administrator after about a year--he preferred to teach and research rather than oversee the entire department.
His specialty was cloud formation and physics, but his natural curiosity led him to read widely in many other scientific fields. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Meteorological Society.
In 1954, while driving through the Arizona deserts with two meteorologists, McDonald spotted an unidentified flying object none of the men could identify with established science. This sighting would spur McDonald’s interest in UFOs. By the late 1950’s he was quietly investigating UFO reports in Arizona, and he had also joined civilian UFO research group NICAP. He was known as a sensitive, friendly interviewer who took pains to avoid asking leading or suggestive questions. Given his training in atmospheric physics, McDonald was able to examine UFO reports in greater detail than most other scientists, and was able to offer explanations for some previously unexplained reports. On the other hand, McDonald uncovered a small minority of well-documented reports which he judged deeply puzzling even after stringent analysis.
By the mid-1960s, McDonald began speaking about UFOs more openly. Following a widely-publicized series of mass UFO reports from Michigan in 1966, he was one of several scientists who urged various authorities to undertake a formal study of UFOs. This pressure eventually culminated in the Condon Committee, directed by esteemed physicist Edward Condon.
Though McDonald shared the initial general enthusiasm towards the Committee, he eventually became one of its sharpest critics. While the Condon Committee was in progress, the Office of Naval Research granted McDonald a small budget in order to conduct his own UFO research, ostensibly to study the idea that some UFOs were misidentified clouds. He was able to peruse the files of Project Blue Book at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and eventually concluded that the Air Force was mishandling UFO evidence. Following the Robertson Panel's recommendations, the Air Force was following a debunking directive, and only discussing UFO cases which were considered solved by a mundane explanation, while unexplained accounts were classified secret.
McDonald was particularly disturbed that astronomer J. Allen Hynek, had not alerted the scientific community to the fact that Project Blue Book was withholding some of the most anomalous and compelling UFO reports. Hynek argued that if he had exposed this, the Air Force would have dumped him as Blue Book’s consultant; Hynek was the only scientist formally studying UFOs for the government. This was the beginning of a rift between the men that would never be entirely reconciled.
From the mid-1960’s, McDonald devoted much of his time to trying to persuade journalists, politicians and his colleagues that UFOs were the most pressing issue facing American science. He gave dozens of lectures, and wrote volumes of letters to newspapers, to his peers (especially at scientific journals) and to politicians. He wrote the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, arguing that they needed to radically shift their superficial perspective toward UFOs. In response, the Air Force determined that they needed to "fireproof" themselves against McDonald’s statements.
McDonald knew that promoting the extraterrestrial hypothesis could damage his credibility, but he was so convinced of its viability that he plowed ahead, regardless of consequences. He managed to secure limited support from a few prominent figures, such as United Nations Secretary General U Thant, who arranged for McDonald to speak to the UN’s Outer Space Affairs Group on June 7, 1967. Additionally in 1967, McDonald noted, "There is no sensible alternative to the utterly shocking hypothesis that UFOs are extraterrestrial probes". (Randles, 65)
McDonald formed alliances with those on the Condon Committee who disagreed with Condon’s leadership and who wanted to undertake long-term UFO studies. McDonald inadvertently played a major role in the Condon Committee’s controversy when he was given a copy of the so-called "Trick Memo" which outlined how the Committee could reach a forgone conclusion while simultaneously appearing neutral. [Edward Condon]] tried to get McDonald fired from the University of Arizona following the exposure of this memorandum.
When the Condon Committee issued their final report, its conclusion that there was nothing unusual about UFO reports (and that further research was not worthwhile) was generally accepted. McDonald, however, was one of a few prominent figures offering detailed critiques against the report’s conclusions and methodology.
As a leading atmospheric physicist, McDonald was one of many experts who testified before Congress in the 1960s against the development of supersonic transport airplanes, for fear that they would damage the ozone layer.
McDonald engaged in an often savagely adversarial relationship with aviation journalist and UFO debunker Philip J. Klass, who had argued in his first book (UFOs: Identified, 1968) that nearly all UFOs might be explained as a type of previously unknown ball lightning. At first, the duo exchanged cordial letters on the subject. Initially, Klass was rather guarded in his application of the plasma theory, and McDonald agreed that it might explain a small portion of UFO reports. However, Klass quickly expanded his hypothesis, arguing that most if not all UFOs could be explained as plasmas. McDonald thought this was absurd, and offered a detailed rebuttal against Klass's thesis. To many observers--even those skeptical of UFOs--McDonald's critique of Klass's arguments demonstrated that Klass lacked even a basic understanding of the theories he proposed.
In late 1967, McDonald secured a modest grant from the Office of Naval Research in order to study cloud formations in Australia. while in Australia, McDonald conducted some UFO research on his own time. Klass mounted an extended, concerted campaign against McDonald, arguing that he had squandered government funds. The ONR responded by announcing that they knew of McDonald’s UFO interests and had no objections to his personal hobbies. The University of Arizona came to McDonald's defense, announcing that McDonald's UFO research was done on his own time, and had no adverse impact on his regular teaching and research duties at the university.
Klass then demonstrated that McDonald was spending at least small sums of government research funds on UFO research, and the ONR, apparently fearing controversy, decided to no longer fund McDonald’s cloud research. Tom McIver writes that afterwards, "Klass accused McDonald of misusing public funds, resulting in a traumatic government investigation and audit (in which he was cleared, though he committed suicide not long afterwards)."[3]
McDonald spoke before the United States Congress for a UFO hearing in 1968. In part, he stated his opinion that “UFOs are entirely real and we do not know what they are, because we have laughed them out of court. The possibility that these are extraterrestrial devices, that we are dealing with surveillance from some advanced technology, is a possibility I take very seriously.” (Clark, 368) McDonald emphasized that he accepted the ETH as a possibility not due to any specific evidence in its favor, but because he judged competing hypotheses as inadequate.
In 1969, McDonald was a speaker at an American Association for the Advancement of Science UFO symposium. There he delivered a lecture, "Science in Default", which Jerome Clark calls "one of the most powerful scientific defenses of UFO reality ever mounted." (Clark, 370) McDonald discussed in detail a handful of well documented UFO cases which seemed, he thought, to defy interpretation by conventional science.
McDonald’s tireless UFO efforts were exacting a toll: he was becoming professionally isolated, and his marriage was faltering. Beyond Klass and Condon, McDonald butted heads with many other prominent figures, including Donald Menzel of Harvard University. McDonald's personality may have been a factor in these confrontations; even his friends described him as sometimes forceful and impatient, while others, less charitably, called him blunt and abrasive.
In March, 1971, McDonald's wife Betsy told him she wanted a divorce. McDonald seems to have began planning his suicide immediately afterwards. He finished a few articles he was writing (UFO-related and otherwise), and made plans for the storage of his notes, papers, and research. In April, 1971, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. He survived, but wasblinded. For a short period, McDonald was committed to the psychiatric ward of a Tucson, Arizona hospital. He recovered a degree of peripheral vision, and made plans to return to his teaching position.
However, the plans seem to have been a ruse designed to reduce suspicion that he was planning another suicide attempt. on June 13, 1971, a family walking along a creek near Tucson found a body that was later identified as McDonald’s. Clark writes that a "suicide note tersely noted the particular domestic development that led to the decision to end his life." (Clark, 371)
Four of McDonald’s peers from the University of Arizona wrote a reminiscence of their colleague, calling him "a man of great integrity and great courage. He was loved and admired by a great many people ... he made a lasting impact on many facets of atmospheric sciences ... and he will be missed much more than we now realize." (Clark, 371)
Books on James E. McDonald
The 2003 book, Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald's Fight for UFO Science, by Ann Druffel is to date the only full length biography of McDonald. Ann Druffel comments
Sources
- Jerome Clark; The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial; Visible Ink, 1998; ISBN 1578590299
- Jenny Randles; The UFO Conspiracy: The First Forty Years; Barnes and Noble Books, 1987; ISBN 1566191955
External links
- Statement on UFOs by James MacDonald to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1968 (PDF)
- Science in Default: Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations, by James E. McDonald
- FBI FILE OF DR. JAMES E. McDONALD
- UFOs: Extraterrestrial Probes? By Dr. James E. McDonald
Copyright
"Original data received from Wikipedia on April 21, 2006. Credit given to original authors can be seen Here."
