When Barry Goldwater Knocked on the Door at Hangar 18
A small chapter from the history of UFOlogy
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Every week since 2006, in my work for Skeptoid, I come upon some beautiful little factoid that I don’t really have a place for. This newsletter is one place I can put them, and I have a neat one for you today.
Barry Goldwater, for those who may not remember, was a longtime US Senator, serving from the 1950s into the 1980s. He unsuccessfully ran for President on the Republican ticket in 1964, losing to Lyndon B. Johnson, and served on the Senate Armed Services committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. The evolution of his policies would make a fascinating book weaving conservatism, progressivism, and libertarianism into a quilt that can only be imagined today, but be that as it may. We’re talking about his interest in aliens today.
I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to track down Goldwater’s interest in UFOs and aliens prior to the 1968 publication of the Condon Report, which found there was nothing really of national interest in the UFO phenomenon, and ruffled a lot of feathers. After that, Goldwater began to make more and more inquiries, and a particular interest of his was the mysterious “Blue Room” at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. (In later years, pop culture has referred to the Blue Room as “Hangar 18”. Wright-Patterson has a Building 18 which is unremarkable office space, but has never had a Hangar 18, or any facility officially named the Blue Room.)
In a series of letters, Goldwater mentioned this room several times. This is from a 1981 letter to a Lee Graham in Los Angeles: