Avi Loeb

So for those folks who don't know, Donald Menzel became a director of astronomy at Harvard.

He came in in 1952 and destroyed a third of the photographic plates just after the biggest UFO sighting in history, I think till this day, and stopped watching the skies.

with no review of the plates, you just destroyed them.

How do you square that?

Well, there is a simple explanation to that.

Please.

Yeah.

He probably either was asked by government or decided that there is a lot of classified information there because it was the same time that satellites were launched for espionage purposes.

So he didn't want that to appear.

Now, the same thing you can find nowadays because the Rubin Observatory in Chile is collecting data on the sky and...

The leader of the science team at the Rubin Observatory said that in an interview, he said that he was approached by an agency within the government that asked him to transfer the data that the Rubin Observatory collects through them first, and they just have a script that they will apply to the data and then give it back to him.

so that he can disseminate it within the scientific community.

So you ask yourself, why do they need to put a script on the data?

Because there are plenty of satellites that the US government doesn't want the world to know about.

Or other gadgets up there.

And I think Menzel was probably motivated by the same thing, but he was much more harsh, basically not allowing any data to be collected because that was just the beginning of the space age.

And they didn't have the protocols to deal with

national security concerns in space.

So he basically probably just did that.

That would be my guess.