59 214434 SP 16 [7.18.1963]

This six-page memo is a rare piece of Cold War policy thinking about contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Maxwell W. Hunter II, a professional staff member of the National Aeronautics and Space Council in the Executive Office of the President, wrote it on July 18, 1963, to Robert F. Packard of the State Department’s Office of International Scientific Affairs. He says the question had come up, rarely, in policy discussions, including the planning work he calls “BNSP Task I.” It is not a UFO report and describes no sighting.

Hunter’s argument

Hunter starts from the scientific consensus that meeting intelligent beings in our solar system is very unlikely. He finds it hard to side with “flying saucer advocates,” but says the near-certainty of most scientists also bothers him. He traces how astronomy had moved toward planets being common and life perhaps arising often, and he plays with Mars lore, from the “canali” to saucer claims that Martians were mining the moon.

He then sorts possible aliens into three kinds: beings with chemical rockets; a nuclear-powered race spreading from star to star at around half the speed of light; and, the case he calls “scientifically abhorrent,” one that travels faster than light. Which kind it was, he argues, would shape policy “in the most drastically possible way” — and with the last, the advice is to “negotiate fast.”

Why it is still quoted

The conclusion mixes seriousness with dry humor. Finding anyone at all, Hunter suggests, would call for “the immediate burying of all Terrestrial hatchets.” He notes that the only writing on the subject available in an emergency is science fiction, and predicts that policy would be set “in the traditional manner of grand panic.” The same council made its own inquiry into a reported incident in Brazil later that year: NASC inquiry into Bahia.