Bruce Maccabee (born May 5, 1942), a career physicist for the U.S. Navy, has investigated unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the U.S. government’s response to them since the late 1960s. In 1998 Maccabee was among the first researchers to publish the FBI’s declassified "flying disc file," which he dubbed the “real X-Files,” to contrast them with the fictional TV show. An active member in the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and later the Mutual UFO Network, Maccabee argued that the CIA and FBI had concealed their interest in UAP, a claim vindicated by subsequent declassification of government records.
In his books and articles Maccabee challenged the contemporary scientific paradigm which he said holds that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena are always (and only) the result of “a mis-identification (failure by the witness and by the sighting investigator to correctly identify what was seen) or from a delusion (mental state of a witness) or from a hoax.” Some sightings, he insisted, could not be explained and should be described as “true unidentified flying objects,” which he dubbed “TRUFOs.”
After submitting his research findings to peer-reviewed science publications, Maccabee concluded “journal editors are biased in favor of articles that offer conventional explanations for UFO sightings even if those conventional explanations conflict with some (or much) of the available information about the sightings.”¹
In his investigations of well-known UAP incidents, Maccabee combined technical analysis with a refusal to dismiss eyewitness accounts corroborated by photographic or radar evidence.
In studying a series of sightings of strangely behaving lights seen over the ocean and (apparently) detected on radar near New Zealand in December 1979, Maccabee interviewed witnesses aboard a freighter aircraft flying in the area. The witnesses included the experienced pilot and copilot, two TV news reporters, a cameraman filming the lights with a professional 16 mm movie camera and a sound recordist capturing the real-time conversation of the witnesses. Skeptics suggested the witnesses had seen lights from a fishing boat or the planet Venus or meteorites, “all of which were proven wrong “ according to Maccabee.
“Evidence that could have proved that one or more glowing objects were under intelligent control was ignored,” he wrote, “and the sightings, perhaps the only civilian sightings in history that can be almost relived minute by minute (using the Wellington and Fogarty tapes and the film), were relegated to being just another annoying UFO report.”
After analyzing video of a purported 1997 UAP sighting captured on video in Mexico City, Maccabee discounted the report saying he detected “the fingerprints of a hoax” in the difference between the blurred images of the flying object and nearby buildings.
Other events that Maccabee studied included the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947, which triggered widespread public interest in UAP for the first time. He analyzed unusual imagery seen in photos taken by the Gemini 11 astronauts in September, 1966, and the Tehran UFO incident of September 1976, in which two Iranian fighter pilots say they encountered--and were temporarily disabled-- by an unidentified flying structure seen over the Iranian capital. Maccabee reported his own UAP sighting in September, 1991.
Maccabee has authored or co-authored six books on unidentified aerial phenomena, most recently in 2018, when he published “The Legacy of 1952: Year of the UFO.”²
Maccabee’s UAP research was buttressed by his scientific training. After earning a B.S. in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and then a masters and Ph.D. at American University, Washington, DC, Maccabee went to work at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Maryland in 1972. His work for the Navy, unrelated to his UAP research, included optical data processing, generation of underwater sound with lasers and various aspects of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Maccabee retired from government service in 2008.
