In the spring of 1966, police officers chased a glowing disc for 85 miles across state lines, and the US Air Force told them they had been pursuing a satellite and then the planet Venus. This deep dive traces the full lifecycle of Project Blue Book, the Air Force UFO investigation headquartered at Wright-Patterson from 1952 to 1969, which collected 12,618 reports and left 701 unexplained.

The episode starts with the failed precursors, Project Sign and Project Grudge, then follows Captain Edward Ruppelt's genuinely scientific era, including the term UFO and the Battelle statistical study using IBM punch cards that found 22 percent of cases unknown, with better witnesses producing more unknowns rather than fewer. It then covers the CIA's Robertson Panel, the shift to public debunking, the bureaucratic adjective-editing that closed cases, the  ...