In the summer of 1952 a United States Air Force F-86 jet interceptor
shot at a flying saucer.
This fact, like so many others that make up the full flying saucer
story, has never before been told.
I know the full story about flying saucers and I know that it has
never before been told because I organized and was chief of the Air
Force's Project Blue Book, the special project set up to investigate
and analyze unidentified flying object, or UFO, reports. (UFO is the
official term that I created to replace the words "flying saucers.")
There is a fighter base in the United States which I used to visit
frequently because, during 1951, 1952, and 1953, it got more than its
share of good UFO reports.
The commanding officer of the fighter group, a full colonel and
command pilot, believed that UFO's were real. The colonel believed in
UFO's because he had a lot of faith in his pilots--and they had
chased UFO's in their F-86's. He had seen UFO's on the scopes of his
radar sets, and he knew radar.
The colonel's intelligence officer, a captain, didn't exactly
believe that UFO's were real, but he did think that they warranted
careful investigation. The logic the intelligence officer used in
investigating UFO reports--and in getting answers to many of them--
made me wish many times that he worked for me on Project Blue Book.
One day the intelligence officer called me at my base in Dayton,
Ohio. He wanted to know if I was planning to make a trip his way
soon. When I told him I expected to be in his area in about a week,
he asked me to be sure to look him up. There was no special hurry, he
added, but he had something very interesting to show me.
When we got wind of a good story, Project Blue Book liked to start
working on it at once, so I asked the intelligence officer to tell me
what he had. But nothing doing. He didn't want to discuss it over the
phone. He even vetoed the idea of putting it into a secret wire. Such
extreme caution really stopped me, because anything can be coded and
put in a wire.
When I left Dayton about a week later I decided to go straight to
the fighter base, planning to arrive there in midmorning. But while I
was changing airlines my reservations got fouled up, and I was faced
with waiting until evening to get to the base. I called the
intelligence officer and told him about the mix-up. He told me to
hang on right there and he would fly over and pick me up in a T-33 jet.
As soon as we were in the air, on the return trip, I called the
intelligence officer on the interphone and asked him what was going
on. What did he have? Why all the mystery? He tried to tell me, but
the interphone wasn't working too well and I couldn't understand what
he was saying. Finally he told me to wait until we returned to his
office and I could read the report myself.
Report! If he had a UFO report why hadn't he sent it in to Project
Blue Book as he usually did?
We landed at the fighter base, checked in our parachutes, Mae Wests,
and helmets, and drove over to his office. There were several other
people in the office, and they greeted me with the usual question,
"What's new on the flying saucer front?" I talked with them for a
while, but was getting impatient to find out what was on the
intelligence officer's mind. I was just about to ask him about the
mysterious report when he took me to one side and quietly asked me
not to mention it until everybody had gone.
Once we were alone, the intelligence officer shut the door, went
over to his safe, and dug out a big, thick report. It was the
standard Air Force reporting form that is used for all intelligence
reports, including UFO reports. The intelligence officer told me that
this was the only existing copy. He said that he had been told to
destroy all copies, but had saved one for me to read.
With great curiosity, I took the report and started to read. What
_had_ happened at this fighter base?
About ten o'clock in the morning, one day a few weeks before, a
radar near the base had picked up an unidentified target. It was an
odd target in that it came in very fast--about 700 miles per hour--
and then slowed down to about 100 miles per hour. The radar showed
that it was located northeast of the airfield, over a sparsely
settled area.
Unfortunately the radar station didn't have any height-finding
equipment. The operators knew the direction of the target and its
distance from the station but they didn't know its altitude. They
reported the target, and two F-86's were scrambled.
The radar picked up the F-86's soon after they were airborne, and
had begun to direct them into the target when the target started to
fade on the radarscope. At the time several of the operators thought
that this fade was caused by the target's losing altitude rapidly and
getting below the radar's beam. Some of the other operators thought
that it was a high-flying target and that it was fading just because
it was so high.
In the debate which followed, the proponents of the high-flying
theory won out, and the F-86's were told to go up to 40,000 feet. But
before the aircraft could get to that altitude, the target had been
completely lost on the radarscope.
The F-86's continued to search the area at 40,000 feet, but could
see nothing. After a few minutes the aircraft ground controller
called the F-86's and told one to come down to 20,000 feet, the other
to 5,000 feet, and continue the search. The two jets made a quick
letdown, with one pilot stopping at 20,000 feet and the other heading
for the deck.
The second pilot, who was going down to 5,000 feet, was just
beginning to pull out when he noticed a flash below and ahead of him.
He flattened out his dive a little and headed toward the spot where
he had seen the light. As he closed on the spot he suddenly noticed
what he first thought was a weather balloon. A few seconds later he
realized that it couldn't be a balloon because it was staying ahead
of him. Quite an achievement for a balloon, since he had built up a
lot of speed in his dive and now was flying almost straight and level
at 3,000 feet and was traveling "at the Mach."
Again the pilot pushed the nose of the F-86 down and started after
the object. He closed fairly fast, until he came to within an
estimated 1,000 yards. Now he could get a good look at the object.
Although it had looked like a balloon from above, a closer view
showed that it was definitely round and flat--saucer-shaped. The
pilot described it as being "like a doughnut without a hole."
As his rate of closure began to drop off, the pilot knew that the
object was picking up speed. But he pulled in behind it and started
to follow. Now he was right on the deck.
About this time the pilot began to get a little worried. What should
he do? He tried to call his buddy, who was flying above him somewhere
in the area at 20,000 feet. He called two or three times but could
get no answer. Next he tried to call the ground controller but he was
too low for his radio to carry that far. Once more he tried his buddy
at 20,000 feet, but again no luck.
By now he had been following the object for about two minutes and
during this time had closed the gap between them to approximately 500
yards. But this was only momentary. Suddenly the object began to pull
away, slowly at first, then faster. The pilot, realizing that he
couldn't catch _it_, wondered what to do next.
When the object traveled out about 1,000 yards, the pilot suddenly
made up his mind--he did the only thing that he could do to stop the
UFO. It was like a David about to do battle with a Goliath, but he
had to take a chance. Quickly charging his guns, he started shooting.
. . . A moment later the object pulled up into a climb and in a few
seconds it was gone. The pilot climbed to 10,000 feet, called the
other F-86, and now was able to contact his buddy. They joined up and
went back to their base.
As soon as he had landed and parked, the F-86 pilot went into
operations to tell his story to his squadron commander. The mere fact
that he had fired his guns was enough to require a detailed report,
as a matter of routine. But the circumstances under which the guns
actually were fired created a major disturbance at the fighter base
that day.
After the squadron commander had heard his pilot's story, he called
the group commander, the colonel, and the intelligence officer. They
heard the pilot's story.
For some obscure reason there was a "personality clash," the
intelligence officer's term, between the pilot and the squadron
commander. This was obvious, according to the report I was reading,
because the squadron commander immediately began to tear the story
apart and accuse the pilot of "cracking up," or of just "shooting his
guns for the hell of it and using the wild story as a cover-up."
Other pilots in the squadron, friends of the accused pilot--
including the intelligence officer and a flight surgeon--were called
in to "testify." All of these men were aware of the fact that in
certain instances a pilot can "flip" for no good reason, but none of
them said that he had noticed any symptoms of mental crack-up in the
unhappy pilot.
None, except the squadron commander. He kept pounding home his idea--
that the pilot was "psycho"--and used a few examples of what the
report called "minor incidents" to justify his stand.
Finally the pilot who had been flying with the "accused" man was
called in. He said that he had been monitoring the tactical radio
channel but that he hadn't heard any calls from his buddy's low-
flying F-86. The squadron commander triumphantly jumped on this
point, but the accused pilot tended to refute it by admitting he was
so jumpy that he might not have been on the right channel. But when
he was asked if he had checked or changed channels after he had lost
the object and before he had finally contacted the other F-86, he
couldn't remember.
So ended the pilot's story and his interrogation.
The intelligence officer wrote up his report of a UFO sighting, but
at the last minute, just before sending it, he was told to hold it
back. He was a little unhappy about this turn of events, so he went
in to see why the group commander had decided to delay sending the
report to Project Blue Book.
They talked over the possible reactions to the report. If it went
out it would cause a lot of excitement, maybe unnecessarily. Yet, if
the pilot actually had seen what he claimed, it was vitally important
to get the report in to ATIC immediately. The group commander said
that he would made his decision after a talk with his executive
officer. They decided not to send the report and ordered it destroyed.
When I finished reading, the intelligence officer's first comment
was, "What do you think?"
Since the evaluation of the report seemed to hinge upon conflicts
between personalities I didn't know, I could venture no opinion,
except that the incident made up the most fascinating UFO report I'd
ever seen. So I batted the intelligence officer's question back to him.
"I know the people involved," he replied, "and I don't think the
pilot was nuts. I can't give you the report, because Colonel ------
told me to destroy it. But I did think you should know about it."
Later he burned the report.
The problems involved in this report are typical. There are certain
definite facts that can be gleaned from it; the pilot did see
something and he did shoot at something, but no matter how thoroughly
you investigate the incident that something can never be positively
identified. It might have been a hallucination or it might have been
some vehicle from outer space; no one will ever know. It was a UFO.
The UFO story started soon after June 24, 1947, when newspapers all
over the United States carried the first flying saucer report. The
story told how nine very bright, disk-shaped objects were seen by
Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman, while he was flying his
private plane near Mount Rainier, in the state of Washington. With
journalistic license, reporters converted Arnold's description of the
individual motion of each of the objects--like "a saucer skipping
across water"--into "flying saucer," a name for the objects
themselves. In the eight years that have passed since Arnold's
memorable sighting, the term has become so common that it is now in
Webster's Dictionary and is known today in most languages in the world.
For a while after the Arnold sighting the term "flying saucer" was
used to describe all disk-shaped objects that were seen flashing
through the sky at fantastic speeds. Before long, reports were made
of objects other than disks, and these were also called flying
saucers. Today the words are popularly applied to anything seen in
the sky that cannot be identified as a common, everyday object.
Thus a flying saucer can be a formation of lights, a single light, a
sphere, or any other shape; and it can be any color. Performance-wise,
flying saucers can hover, go fast or slow, go high or low, turn 90-
degree corners, or disappear almost instantaneously.
Obviously the term "flying saucer" is misleading when applied to
objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason
the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name:
unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short.
Officially the military uses the term "flying saucer" on only two
occasions. First in an explanatory sense, as when briefing people who
are unacquainted with the term "UFO": "UFO--you know--flying
saucers." And second in a derogatory sense, for purposes of ridicule,
as when it is observed, "He says he saw a flying saucer."
This second form of usage is the exclusive property of those persons
who positively know that all UFO's are nonsense. Fortunately, for the
sake of good manners if for no other reason, the ranks of this
knowing category are constantly dwindling. One by one these people
drop out, starting with the instant they see their first UFO.
Some weeks after the first UFO was seen on June 24, 1947, the Air
Force established a project to investigate and analyze all UFO
reports. The attitude toward this task varied from a state of near
panic, early in the life of the project, to that of complete contempt
for anyone who even mentioned the words "flying saucer."
This contemptuous attitude toward "flying saucer nuts" prevailed
from mid-1949 to mid-1950. During that interval many of the people
who were, or had been, associated with the project believed that the
public was suffering from "war nerves."
Early in 1950 the project, for all practical purposes, was closed
out; at least it rated only minimum effort. Those in power now
reasoned that if you didn't mention the words "flying saucers" the
people would forget them and the saucers would go away. But this
reasoning was false, for instead of vanishing, the UFO reports got
better and better.
Airline pilots, military pilots, generals, scientists, and dozens of
other people were reporting UFO's, and in greater detail than in
reports of the past. Radars, which were being built for air defense,
began to pick up some very unusual targets, thus lending technical
corroboration to the unsubstantiated claims of human observers.
As a result of the continuing accumulation of more impressive UFO
reports, official interest stirred. Early in 1951 verbal orders came
down from Major General Charles P. Cabell, then Director of
Intelligence for Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, to make a study
reviewing the UFO situation for Air Force Headquarters.
I had been back in the Air Force about six months when this
happened. During the second world war I had been a B-29 bombardier
and radar operator. I went to India, China, and later to the Pacific,
with the original B-29 wing. I flew two DCF's, and some Air Medals'
worth of missions, got out of the Air Force after the war, and went
back to college. To keep my reserve status while I was in school, I
flew as a navigator in an Air Force Reserve Troop Carrier Wing.
Not long after I received my degree in aeronautical engineering, the
Korean War started, and I went back on active duty. I was assigned to
the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force
Base, in Dayton, Ohio. ATIC is responsible for keeping track of all
foreign aircraft and guided missiles. ATIC also had the UFO project.
I had just finished organizing a new intelligence group when General
Cabell's order to review past UFO reports came down. Lieutenant
Colonel Rosengarten, who received the order at ATIC, called me in and
wanted to know if I'd take the job of making the review. I accepted.
When the review was finished, I went to the Pentagon and presented
my findings to Major General Samford, who had replaced General Cabell
as Director of Intelligence.
ATIC soon got the word to set up a completely new project for the
investigation and analysis of UFO reports. Since I had made the
review of past UFO reports I was the expert, and I got the new job.
It was given the code name Project Blue Book, and I was in charge of
it until late in 1953. During this time members of my staff and I
traveled close to half a million miles. We investigated dozens of UFO
reports, and read and analyzed several thousand more. These included
every report ever received by the Air Force.
For the size of the task involved Project Blue Book was always
understaffed, even though I did have ten people on my regular staff
plus many paid consultants representing every field of science. All
of us on Project Blue Book had Top Secret security clearances so that
security was no block in our investigations. Behind this organization
was a reporting network made up of every Air Force base intelligence
officer and every Air Force radar station in the world, and the Air
Defense Command's Ground Observer Corps. This reporting net sent
Project Blue Book reports on every conceivable type of UFO, by every
conceivable type of person.
What did these people actually see when they reported that they had
observed a UFO? Putting aside truly unidentifiable flying objects for
the present, this question has several answers.
In many instances it has been positively proved that people have
reported balloons, airplanes, stars, and many other common objects as
UFO's. The people who make such reports don't recognize these common
objects because something in their surroundings temporarily assumes
an unfamiliar appearance.
Unusual lighting conditions are a common cause of such illusions. A
balloon will glow like a "ball of fire" just at sunset. Or an
airplane that is not visible to the naked eye suddenly starts to
reflect the sun's rays and appears to be a "silver ball." Pilots in F-
94 jet interceptors chase Venus in the daytime and fight with
balloons at night, and people in Los Angeles see weird lights.
On October 8, 1954, many Los Angeles newspapers and newscasters
carried an item about a group of flying saucers, bright lights,
flying in a V formation. The lights had been seen from many locations
over Southern California. Pilots saw them while bringing their
airplanes into Los Angeles International Airport, Air Force pilots
flying out of Long Beach saw them, two CBS reporters in Hollywood
gave an eyewitness account, and countless people called police and
civil defense officials. All of them excitedly reported lights they
could not identify. The next day the Air Force identified the UFO's;
they were Air Force airplanes, KC-97 aerial tankers, refueling B-47
jet bombers in flight. The reason for the weird effect that startled
so many Southern Californians was that when the refueling is taking
place a floodlight on the bottom of the tanker airplane lights up the
bomber that is being refueled. The airplanes were flying high, and
slowly, so no sound was heard; only the bright floodlights could be
seen. Since most people, even other pilots, have never seen a night
aerial refueling operation and could not identify the odd lights they
saw, the lights became UFO's.
In other instances common everyday objects look like UFO's because
of some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been
in the sky every day of the observer's life suddenly "takes off at
high speed on a highly erratic flight path." Or a vapor trail from a
high-flying jet--seen a hundred times before by the observer--becomes
a flying saucer.
Some psychologists explain such aberrations as being akin to the
crowd behavior mechanism at work in the "bobby-sox craze." Teen-agers
don't know why they squeal and swoon when their current fetish sways
and croons. Yet everybody else is squealing, so they squeal too.
Maybe that great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: "Everybody
wants to get into the act." I am convinced that a certain percentage
of UFO reports come from people who see flying saucers because others
report seeing them.
But this "will to see" may have deeper roots, almost religious
implications, for some people. Consciously or unconsciously, they
want UFO's to be real and to come from outer space. These
individuals, frightened perhaps by threats of atomic destruction, or
lesser fears--who knows what--act as if nothing that men can do can
save the earth. Instead, they seek salvation from outer space, on the
forlorn premise that flying saucer men, by their very existence, are
wiser and more advanced than we. Such people may reason that a race
of men capable of interplanetary travel have lived well into, or
through, an atomic age. They have survived and they can tell us their
secret of survival. Maybe the threat of an atomic war unified their
planet and allowed them to divert their war effort to one of social
and technical advancement. To such people a searchlight on a cloud or
a bright star is an interplanetary spaceship.
If all the UFO reports that the Air Force has received in the past
eight years could be put in this "psychological quirk" category,
Project Blue Book would never have been organized. It is another
class of reports that causes the Air Force to remain interested in
UFO's. This class of reports are called "Unknowns."
In determining the identity of a UFO, the project based its method
of operation on a well-known psychological premise. This premise is
that to get a reaction from one of the senses there must be a
stimulus. If you think you see a UFO you must have seen something.
Pure hallucinations are extremely rare.
For anything flying in the air the stimulus could be anything that
is normally seen in the air. Balloons, airplanes, and astronomical
bodies are the commoner stimuli. Birds and insects are common also,
but usually are seen at such close range that they are nearly always
recognized. Infrequently observed things, such as sundogs, mirages,
huge fireballs, and a host of other unusual flying objects, are also
known stimuli.
On Project Blue Book our problem was to identify these stimuli. We
had methods for checking the location, at any time, of every balloon
launched anywhere in the United States. To a certain degree the same
was true for airplanes. The UFO observer's estimate of where the
object was located in the sky helped us to identify astronomical
bodies. Huge files of UFO characteristics, along with up-to-the-
minute weather data, and advice from specialists, permitted us to
identify such things as sun-dogs, paper caught in updrafts, huge
meteors, etc.
This determination of the stimuli that triggered UFO sightings,
while not an insurmountable task, was a long, tedious process. The
identification of known objects was routine, and caused no
excitement. The excitement and serious interest occurred when we
received UFO reports in which the observer was reliable and the
stimuli could not be identified. These were the reports that
challenged the project and caused me to spend hours briefing top U.S.
officials. These were the reports that we called "Unknowns."
Of the several thousand UFO reports that the Air Force has received
since 1947, some 15 to 20 per cent fall into this category called
unknown. This means that the observer was not affected by any
determinable psychological quirks and that after exhaustive
investigation the object that was reported could not be identified.
To be classed as an unknown, a UFO report also had to be "good,"
meaning that it had to come from a competent observer and had to
contain a reasonable amount of data.
Reports are often seen in the newspapers that say: "Mrs. Henry
Jones, of 5464 South Elm, said that 10:00A.M. she was shaking her
dust mop out of the bedroom window when she saw a flying saucer"; or
"Henry Armstrong was driving between Grundy Center and Rienbeck last
night when he saw a light. Henry thinks it was a flying saucer." This
is not a good UFO report.
This type of UFO report, if it was received by Project Blue Book,
was stamped "Insufficient Data for Evaluation" and dropped into the
dead file, where it became a mere statistic.
Next to the "Insufficient Data" file was a file marked "C.P." This
meant crackpot. Into this file went all reports from people who had
talked with flying saucer crews, who had inspected flying saucers
that had landed in the United States, who had ridden in flying
saucers, or who were members of flying saucer crews. By Project Blue
Book standards, these were not "good" UFO reports either.
But here is a "good" UFO report with an "unknown" conclusion:
On July 24, 1952, two Air Force colonels, flying a B-25, took off
from Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco, for Colorado
Springs, Colorado. The day was clear, not a cloud in the sky.
The colonels had crossed the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and
Reno and were flying east at 11,000 feet on "Green 3," the aerial
highway to Salt Lake City. At 3:40P.M. they were over the Carson Sink
area of Nevada, when one of the colonels noticed three objects ahead
of them and a little to their right. The objects looked like three F-
86's flying a tight V formation. If they were F-86's they should have
been lower, according to civil air regulations, but on a clear day
some pilots don't watch their altitude too closely.
In a matter of seconds the three aircraft were close enough to the B-
25 to be clearly seen. They were not F-86's. They were three bright
silver, delta wing craft with no tails and no pilot's canopies. The
only thing that broke the sharply defined, clean upper surface of the
triangular wing was a definite ridge that ran from the nose to the
tail.
In another second the three deltas made a slight left bank and shot
by the B-25 at terrific speed. The colonels estimated that the speed
was at least three times that of an F-86. They got a good look at the
three deltas as the unusual craft passed within 400 to 800 yards of
the B-25.
When they landed at Colorado Springs, the two colonels called the
intelligence people at Air Defense Command Headquarters to make a UFO
report. The suggestion was offered that they might have seen three F-
86's. The colonels promptly replied that if the objects had been F-
86's they would have easily been recognized as such. The colonels
knew what F-86's looked like.
Air Defense Command relayed the report to Project Blue Book. An
investigation was started at once.
Flight Service, which clears all military aircraft flights, was
contacted and asked about the location of aircraft near the Carson
Sink area at 3:40P.M. They had no record of the presence of aircraft
in that area.
Since the colonels had mentioned delta wing aircraft, and both the
Air Force and the Navy had a few of this type, we double-checked. The
Navy's deltas were all on the east coast, at least all of the silver
ones were. A few deltas painted the traditional navy blue were on the
west coast, but not near Carson Sink. The Air Force's one delta was
temporarily grounded.
Since balloons once in a while can appear to have an odd shape, all
balloon flights were checked for both standard weather balloons and
the big 100-foot-diameter research balloons. Nothing was found.
A quick check on the two colonels revealed that both of them were
command pilots and that each had several thousand hours of flying
time. They were stationed at the Pentagon. Their highly classified
assignments were such that they would be in a position to recognize
_anything_ that the United States knows to be flying anywhere in the
world.
Both men had friends who had "seen flying saucers" at some time, but
both had openly voiced their skepticism. Now, from what the colonels
said when they were interviewed after landing at Colorado Springs,
they had changed their opinions.
Nobody knows what the two colonels saw over Carson Sink. However, it
is always possible to speculate. Maybe they just thought they were
close enough to the three objects to see them plainly. The objects
might have been three F-86's: maybe Flight Service lost the records.
It could be that the three F-86's had taken off to fly in the local
area of their base but had decided to do some illegal sight-seeing.
Flight Service would have no record of a flight like this. Maybe both
of the colonels had hallucinations.
There is a certain mathematical probability that any one of the
above speculative answers is correct--correct for this one case. If
you try this type of speculation on hundreds of sightings with
"unknown" answers, the probability that the speculative answers are
correct rapidly approaches zero.
Maybe the colonels actually did see what they thought they did, a
type of craft completely foreign to them.
Another good UFO report provides an incident in which there is
hardly room for any speculation of this type. The conclusion is more
simply, "Unknown," period.
On January 20, 1952, at seven-twenty in the evening, two master
sergeants, both intelligence specialists, were walking down a street
on the Fairchild Air Force Base, close to Spokane, Washington.
Suddenly both men noticed a large, bluish-white, spherical-shaped
object approaching from the east. They stopped and watched the object
carefully, because several of these UFO's had been reported by pilots
from the air base over the past few months. The sergeants had written
up the reports on these earlier sightings.
The object was traveling at a moderately fast speed on a horizontal
path. As it passed to the north of their position and disappeared in
the west, the sergeants noted that it had a long blue tail. At no
time did they hear any sound. They noted certain landmarks that the
object had crossed and estimated the time taken in passing these
landmarks. The next day they went out and measured the angles between
these landmarks in order to include them in their report.
When we got the report at ATIC, our first reaction was that the
master sergeants had seen a large meteor. From the evidence I had
written off, as meteors, all previous similar UFO reports from this
air base.
The sergeants' report, however, contained one bit of information
that completely changed the previous picture. At the time of the
sighting there had been a solid 6,000-foot-thick overcast at 4,700
feet. And meteors don't go that low.
A few quick calculations gave a rather fantastic answer. If the
object was just at the base of the clouds it would have been 10,000
feet from the two observers and traveling 1,400 miles per hour.
But regardless of the speed, the story was still fantastic. The
object was no jet airplane because there was no sound. It was not a
searchlight because there were none on the air base. It was not an
automobile spotlight because a spotlight will not produce the type of
light the sergeants described. As a double check, however, both men
were questioned on this point. They stated firmly that they had seen
hundreds of searchlights and spotlights playing on clouds, and that
this was not what they saw.
Beyond these limited possibilities the sergeants' UFO discourages
fruitful speculation. The object remains unidentified.
The UFO reports made by the two colonels and the two master
sergeants are typical of hundreds of other good UFO reports which
carry the verdict, "Conclusion unknown."
Some of these UFO reports have been publicized, but many have not.
Very little information pertaining to UFO's was withheld from the
press--if the press knew of the occurrence of specific sightings. Our
policy on releasing information was to answer only direct questions
from the press. If the press didn't know about a given UFO incident,
they naturally couldn't ask questions about it. Consequently such
stories were never released. In other instances, when the particulars
of a UFO sighting were released, they were only the bare facts about
what was reported. Any additional information that might have been
developed during later investigations and analyses was not released.
There is a great deal of interest in UFO's and the interest shows no
signs of diminishing. Since the first flying saucer skipped across
the sky in the summer of 1947, thousands of words on this subject
have appeared in every newspaper and most magazines in the United
States. During a six-month period in 1952 alone 148 of the nation's
leading newspapers carried a total of over 16,000 items about flying
saucers.
During July 1952 reports of flying saucers sighted over Washington,
D.C., cheated the Democratic National Convention out of precious
headline space.
The subject of flying saucers, which has generated more unscientific
behavior than any other topic of modern times, has been debated at
the meetings of professional scientific societies, causing scientific
tempers to flare where unemotional objectivity is supposed to reign
supreme.
Yet these thousands of written words and millions of spoken words--
all attesting to the general interest--have generated more heat than
light. Out of this avalanche of print and talk, the full, factual,
true story of UFO's has emerged only on rare occasions. The general
public, for its interest in UFO's, has been paid off in misinformation.
Many civilian groups must have sensed this, for while I was chief of
Project Blue Book I had dozens of requests to speak on the subject of
UFO's. These civilian requests had to be turned down because of
security regulations.
I did give many official briefings, however, behind closed doors, to
certain groups associated with the government--all of them upon
request.
The subject of UFO's was added to a regular series of intelligence
briefings given to students at the Air Force's Command and Staff
School, and to classes at the Air Force's Intelligence School.
I gave briefings to the technical staff at the Atomic Energy
Commission's Los Alamos laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was
built. The theater where this briefing took place wouldn't hold all
of the people who tried to get in, so the briefing was recorded and
replayed many times. The same thing happened at AEC's Sandia Base,
near Albuquerque.
Many groups in the Pentagon and the Office of Naval Research
requested UFO briefings. Civilian groups, made up of some of the
nation's top scientists and industrialists, and formed to study
special military problems, worked in a UFO briefing. Top Air Force
commanders were given periodic briefings.
Every briefing I gave was followed by a discussion that lasted
anywhere from one to four hours.
In addition to these, Project Blue Book published a classified
monthly report on UFO activity. Requests to be put on distribution
for this report were so numerous that the distribution had to be
restricted to major Air Force Command Headquarters.
This interest was not caused by any revolutionary information that
was revealed in the briefings or reports. It stemmed only from a
desire to get the facts about an interesting subject.
Many aspects of the UFO problem were covered in these official
briefings. I would give details of many of the better reports we
received, our conclusions about them, and how those conclusions were
reached. If we had identified a UFO, the audience was told how the
identification was made. If we concluded that the answer to a UFO
sighting was "Unknown," the audience learned why we were convinced it
was unknown.
Among the better sightings that were described fully to interested
government groups were: the complete story of the Lubbock Lights,
including the possible sighting of the same V-shaped light formations
at other locations on the same night; the story of a group of
scientists who detected mysterious nuclear radiation when UFO's were
sighted; and all of the facts behind such famous cases as the Mantell
Incident, the Florida scoutmaster who was burned by a "flying
saucer," and headline-capturing sightings at Washington, D.C.
I showed them what few photographs we had, the majority of which
everyone has seen, since they have been widely published in magazines
and newspapers. Our collection of photographs was always a
disappointment as far as positive proof was concerned because, in a
sense, if you've seen one you've seen them all. We had no clear
pictures of a saucer, just an assortment of blurs, blotches, and
streaks of light.
The briefings included a description of how Project Blue Book
operated and a survey of the results of the many studies that were
made of the mass of UFO data we had collected. Also covered were our
interviews with a dozen North American astronomers, the story of the
unexplained green fireballs of New Mexico, and an account of how a
committee of six distinguished United States scientists spent many
hours attempting to answer the question, "Are the UFO's from outer
space?"
Unfortunately the general public was never able to hear these
briefings. For a long time, contrary to present thinking in military
circles, I have believed that the public also is entitled to know the
details of what was covered in these briefings (less, of course, the
few items pertaining to radar that were classified "Secret," and the
names of certain people). But withholding these will not alter the
facts in any way.
A lot has already been written on the subject of UFO's, but none of
it presents the true, complete story. Previous forays into the UFO
field have been based on inadequate information and have been warped
to fit the personal biases of the individual writers. Well meaning
though these authors may be, the degree to which their books have
misinformed the public is incalculable.
It is high time that we let the people know.
The following chapters present the true and complete UFO story,
based on what I learned about UFO's while I was chief of Project Blue
Book, the Air Force's project for the investigation and analysis of
UFO reports. Here is the same information that I gave to Secretary of
the Air Force, Thomas K. Finletter, to the Air Force commanders, to
scientists and industrialists. This is what the Air Force knows about
unidentified flying objects.
You may not agree with some of the official ideas or conclusions--
neither did a lot of people I briefed--but this is the story.