swamp gas

And swirling around the Princess of Wales’s illness, as she continues with cancer treatment, has been a toxic swamp gas of social media gossip and crazy speculation.

That is a shocking change from the formal stance of the Air Force at the end of Project Blue Book, when Pentagon generals dismissed the UFO phenomenon as hoaxes, reflections of the planet Venus and/or "swamp gas."

Project Blue Book continued until 1969, and as its lead debunker, Hynek offered often ridiculous or insulting explanations, such as suggesting that a mass sighting in Michigan was really just “swamp gas,” an explanation then-President Gerald Ford called out as unsatisfactory and “flippant.”

The Air Force officials attributed the incident to "swamp gas", leading Ford to deride their description as "flippant" .

Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan, who was House Republican leader at the time, organized a hearing in response to scores of witness accounts of strange glowing lights and large football shapes at low altitude around Dexter, Michigan, which an Air Force official had famously explained away as "swamp gas."