Executive Summary
The illegibility and challenging nature of the digitized Project Blue Book files are not the result of a single error but a “perfect storm” of cumulative degradation across distinct historical eras. This report concludes that the poor quality of the records is an unintentional byproduct of their entire lifecycle, from creation to digitization. The core issues stem from three phases: 1) The original documents were created as functional, ephemeral field reports with no thought to archival permanence, resulting in rushed handwriting and varied formats. 2) Subsequent archival processing in the 1970s, including photocopying for redaction and microfilming for preservation, introduced significant, irreversible quality loss due to the technological limitations of the time. 3) Modern digitization efforts, scanning from these already-degraded microfilm copies, compounded the existing flaws and created a final digital product that is a faint, distorted “ghost” of the original records, posing immense challenges for both human researchers and automated text recognition software.
Glossary of Acronyms
- NARA: National Archives and Records Administration
- OCR: Optical Character Recognition
- OSI: Office of Special Investigations (U.S. Air Force)
- PII: Personally Identifiable Information
- UAP: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena