In early June 1952, Project Blue Book was operating according to the
operational plan that had been set up in January 1952. It had taken
six months to put the plan into effect, and to a person who has never
been indoctrinated into the ways of the military, this may seem like
a long time. But consult your nearest government worker and you'll
find that it was about par for the red tape course.
We had learned early in the project that about 60 per cent of the
reported UFO's were actually balloons, airplanes, or astronomical
bodies viewed under unusual conditions, so our operational plan was
set up to quickly weed out this type of report. This would give us
more time to concentrate on the unknown cases.
To weed out reports in which balloons, airplanes, and astronomical
bodies were reported as UFO's, we utilized a flow of data that
continually poured into Project Blue Book. We received position
reports on all flights of the big skyhook balloons and, by merely
picking up the telephone, we could get the details about the flight
of any other research balloon or regularly scheduled weather balloon
in the United States. The location of aircraft in an area where a UFO
had been reported was usually checked by the intelligence officer who
made the report, but we double-checked his findings by requesting the
location of flights from CAA and military air bases. Astronomical
almanacs and journals, star charts, and data that we got from
observatories furnished us with clues to UFO's that might be
astronomical bodies. All of our investigations in this category of
report were double-checked by Project Bear's astronomer.
Then we had our newspaper clipping file, which gave us many clues.
Hydrographic bulletins and Notams (notices to airmen), published by
the government, sometimes gave us other clues. Every six hours we
received a complete set of weather data. A dozen or more other
sources of data that might shed some light on a reported UFO were
continually being studied.
To get all this information on balloons, aircraft, astronomical
bodies, and what have you, I had to co-ordinate Project Blue Book's
operational plan with the Air Force's Air Weather Service, Flight
Service, Research and Development Command, and Air Defense Command
with the Navy's Office of Naval Research, and the aerology branch of
the Bureau of Aeronautics; and with the Civil Aeronautics
Administration, Bureau of Standards, several astronomical
observatories, and our own Project Bear. Our entire operational plan
was similar to a Model A Ford I had while I was in high school--just
about the time you would get one part working, another part would
break down.
When a report came through our screening process and still had the
"Unknown" tag on it, it went to the MO file, where we checked its
characteristics against other reports. For example, on May 25 we had
a report from Randolph AFB, Texas. It went through the screening
process and came out "Unknown"; it wasn't a balloon, airplane, or
astronomical body. So then it went to the MO file. It was a flock of
ducks reflecting the city lights. We knew that the Texas UFO's were
ducks because our MO file showed that we had an identical report from
Moorhead, Minnesota, and the UFO's at Moorhead were ducks.
Radar reports that came into Blue Book went to the radar specialists
of ATIC's electronics branch.
Sifting through reams of data in search of the answers to the many
reports that were pouring in each week required many hours of
overtime work, but when a report came out with the final conclusion,
"Unknown," we were sure that it was unknown.
To operate Project Blue Book, I had four officers, two airmen, and
two civilians on my permanent staff. In addition, there were three
scientists employed full time on Project Bear, along with several
others who worked part time. In the Pentagon, Major Fournet, who had
taken on the Blue Book liaison job as an extra duty, was now spending
full time on it. If you add to this the number of intelligence
officers all over the world who were making preliminary
investigations and interviewing UFO observers, Project Blue Book was
a sizable effort.
Only the best reports we received could be personally investigated
in the field by Project Blue Book personnel. The vast majority of the
reports had to be evaluated on the basis of what the intelligence
officer who had written the report had been able to uncover, or what
data we could get by telephone or by mailing out a questionnaire. Our
instructions for "what to do before the Blue Book man arrives," which
had been printed in many service publications, were beginning to pay
off and the reports were continually getting more detailed.
The questionnaire we were using in June 1952 was the one that had
recently been developed by Project Bear. Project Bear, along with
psychologists from a midwestern university, had worked on it for five
months. Many test models had been tried before it reached its final
form--the standard questionnaire that Blue Book is using today.
It ran eight pages and had sixty-eight questions which were booby-
trapped in a couple of places to give us a cross check on the
reliability of the reporter as an observer. We received quite a few
questionnaires answered in such a way that it was obvious that the
observer was drawing heavily on his imagination.
From this standard questionnaire the project worked up two more
specialized types. One dealt with radar sightings of UFO's, the other
with sightings made from airplanes.
In Air Force terminology a "flap" is a condition, or situation, or
state of being of a group of people characterized by an advanced
degree of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions.
It can be brought on by any number of things, including the
unexpected visit of an inspecting general, a major administrative
reorganization, the arrival of a hot piece of intelligence
information, or the dramatic entrance of a well-stacked female into
an officers' club bar.
In early June 1952 the Air Force was unknowingly in the initial
stages of a flap--a flying saucer flap--_the_ flying saucer flap of
1952. The situation had never been duplicated before, and it hasn't
been duplicated since. All records for the number of UFO reports were
not just broken, they were disintegrated. In 1948, 167 UFO reports
had come into ATIC; this was considered a big year. In June 1952 we
received 149. During the four years the Air Force had been in the UFO
business, 615 reports had been collected. During the "Big Flap" our
incoming-message log showed 717 reports.
To anyone who had anything to do with flying saucers, the summer of
1952 was just one big swirl of UFO reports, hurried trips, midnight
telephone calls, reports to the Pentagon, press interviews, and very
little sleep.
If you can pin down a date that the Big Flap started, it would
probably be about June 1.
It was also on June 1 that we received a good report of a UFO that
had been picked up on radar. June 1 was a Sunday, but I'd been at the
office all day getting ready to go to Los Alamos the next day. About
5:00P.M. the telephone rang and the operator told me that I had a
long-distance call from California. My caller was the chief of a
radar test section for Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, and he
was very excited about a UFO he had to report.
That morning he and his test crew had been checking out a new late-
model radar to get it ready for some tests they planned to run early
Monday morning. To see if their set was functioning properly, they
had been tracking jets in the Los Angeles area. About midmorning, the
Hughes test engineer told me, the jet traffic had begun to drop off,
and they were about ready to close down their operation when one of
the crew picked up a slow-moving target coming across the San Gabriel
Mountains north of Los Angeles. He tracked the target for a few
minutes and, from the speed and altitude, decided that it was a DC-3.
It was at 11,000 feet and traveling about 180 miles an hour toward
Santa Monica. The operator was about ready to yell at the other crew
members to shut off the set when he noticed something mighty odd--
there was a big gap between the last and the rest of the regularly
spaced bright spots on the radarscope. The man on the scope called
the rest of the crew in because DC-3's just don't triple their speed.
They watched the target as it made a turn and started to climb over
Los Angeles. They plotted one, two, three, and then four points
during the target's climb; then one of the crew grabbed a slide rule.
Whatever it was, it was climbing 35,000 feet per minute and traveling
about 550 miles an hour in the process. Then as they watched the
scope, the target leveled out for a few seconds, went into a high-
speed dive, and again leveled out at 55,000 feet. When they lost the
target, it was heading southeast somewhere near Riverside, California.
During the sighting my caller told me that when the UFO was only
about ten miles from the radar site two of the crew had gone outside
but they couldn't see anything. But, he explained, even the high-
flying jets that they had been tracking hadn't been leaving vapor
trails.
The first thing I asked when the Hughes test engineer finished his
story was if the radar set had been working properly. He said that as
soon as the UFO had left the scope they had run every possible check
on the radar and it was O.K.
I was just about to ask my caller if the target might not have been
some experimental airplane from Edwards AFB when he second-guessed
me. He said that after sitting around looking at each other for about
a minute, someone suggested that they call Edwards. They did, and
Edwards' flight operations told them that they had nothing in the area.
I asked him about the weather. The target didn't look like a weather
target was the answer, but just to be sure, the test crew had
checked. One of his men was an electronics-weather specialist whom he
had hired because of his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of radar
under certain weather conditions. This man had looked into the
weather angle. He had gotten the latest weather data and checked it,
but there wasn't the slightest indication of an inversion or any
other weather that would cause a false target.
Just before I hung up I asked the man what he thought he and his
crew had picked up, and once again I got the same old answer:
"Yesterday at this time any of us would have argued for hours that
flying saucers were a bunch of nonsense but now, regardless of what
you'll say about what we saw, it was something damned real."
I thanked the man for calling and hung up. We couldn't make any more
of an analysis of this report than had already been made, it was
another unknown.
I went over to the MO file and pulled out the stack of cards behind
the tab "High-Speed Climb." There must have been at least a hundred
cards, each one representing a UFO report in which the reported
object made a high-speed climb. But this was the first time radar had
tracked a UFO during a climb.
During the early part of June, Project Blue Book took another jump
up on the organizational chart. A year before the UFO project had
consisted of one officer. It had risen from the one-man operation to
a project within a group, then to a group, and now it was a section.
Neither Project Sign nor the old Project Grudge had been higher than
the project-within-a-group level. The chief of a group normally calls
for a lieutenant colonel, and since I was just a captain this caused
some consternation in the ranks. There was some talk about putting
Lieutenant Colonel Ray Taylor of Colonel Dunn's staff in charge.
Colonel Taylor was very much interested in UFO's; he had handled some
of the press contacts prior to turning this function over to the
Pentagon and had gone along with me on briefings, so he knew
something about the project. But in the end Colonel Donald Bower, who
was my division chief, decided rank be damned, and I stayed on as
chief of Project Blue Book.
The location within the organizational chart is always indicative of
the importance placed on a project. In June 1952 the Air Force was
taking the UFO problem seriously. One of the reasons was that there
were a lot of good UFO reports coming in from Korea. Fighter pilots
reported seeing silver-colored spheres or disks on several occasions,
and radar in Japan, Okinawa, and in Korea had tracked unidentified
targets.
In June our situation map, on which we kept a plot of all of our
sightings, began to show an ever so slight trend toward reports
beginning to bunch up on the east coast. We discussed this build-up,
but we couldn't seem to find any explainable reason for it so we
decided that we'd better pay special attention to reports coming from
the eastern states.
I had this build-up of reports in mind one Sunday night, June 15 to
be exact, when the OD at ATIC called me at home and said that we were
getting a lot of reports from Virginia. Each report by itself wasn't
too good, the OD told me, but together they seemed to mean something.
He suggested that I come out and take a look at them--so I did.
Individually they weren't too good, but when I lined them up
chronologically and plotted them on a map they took the form of a hot
report.
At 3:40P.M. a woman at Unionville, Virginia, had reported a "very
shiny object" at high altitude.
At 4:20P.M. the operators of the CAA radio facility at Gordonsville,
Virginia, had reported that they saw a "round, shiny object." It was
southeast of their station, or directly south of Unionville.
At 4:25P.M. the crew of an airliner northwest of Richmond, Virginia,
reported a "silver sphere at eleven o'clock high."
At 4:43P.M. a Marine pilot in a jet tried to intercept a "round
shiny sphere" south of Gordonsville.
At 5:43P.M. an Air Force T-33 jet tried to intercept a "shiny
sphere" south of Gordonsville. He got above 35,000 feet and the UFO
was still far above him.
At 7:35P.M. many people in Blackstone, Virginia, about 80 miles
south of Gordonsville, reported it. It was a "round, shiny object
with a golden glow" moving from north to south. By this time radio
commentators in central Virginia were giving a running account of the
UFO's progress.
At 7:59P.M. the people in the CAA radio facility at Blackstone saw it.
At 8:00P.M. jets arrived from Langley AFB to attempt to intercept
it, but at 8:05P.M. it disappeared.
This was a good report because it was the first time we ever
received a series of reports on the same object, and there was no
doubt that all these people had reported the same object. Whatever it
was, it wasn't moving too fast, because it had traveled only about 90
miles in four hours and twenty-five minutes. I was about ready to
give up until morning and go home when my wife called. The local
Associated Press man had called our home and she assumed that it was
about this sighting. She had just said that I was out so he might not
call the base. I decided that I'd better keep working so I'd have the
answer in time to keep the story out of the papers. A report like
this could cause some excitement.
The UFO obviously wasn't a planet because it was moving from north
to south, and it was too slow to be an airplane. I called the balloon-
plotting center at Lowry AFB, where the tracks of the big skyhook
balloons are plotted, but the only big balloons in the air were in
the western United States, and they were all accounted for.
It might have been a weather balloon. The wind charts showed that
the high-altitude winds were blowing in different directions at
different altitudes above 35,000 feet, so there was no one flow of
air that could have brought a balloon in from a certain area, and I
knew that the UFO had to be higher than 35,000 feet because the T-33
jet had been this high and the UFO was still above it. The only thing
to do was to check with all of the weather stations in the area. I
called Richmond, Roanoke, several places in the vicinity of
Washington, D.C., and four or five other weather stations, but all of
their balloons were accounted for and none had been anywhere close to
the central part of Virginia.
A balloon can travel only so far, so there was no sense in checking
stations too far away from where the people had seen the UFO, but I
took a chance and called Norfolk; Charleston, West Virginia; Altoona,
Pennsylvania; and other stations within a 150-mile radius of
Gordonsville and Blackstone. Nothing.
I still thought it might be a balloon, so I started to call more
stations. At Pittsburgh I hit a lead. Their radiosonde balloon had
gone up to about 60,000 feet and evidently had sprung a slow leak
because it had leveled off at that altitude. Normally balloons go up
till they burst at 80,000 or 90,000 feet. The weather forecaster at
Pittsburgh said that their records showed they had lost contact with
the balloon when it was about 60 miles southeast of their station. He
said that the winds at 60,000 feet were constant, so it shouldn't be
too difficult to figure out where the balloon went after they had
lost it. Things must be dull in Pittsburgh at 2:00 a.m. on Monday
mornings, because he offered to plot the course that the balloon
probably took and call me back.
In about twenty minutes I got my call. It probably was their
balloon, the forecaster said. Above 50,000 feet there was a strong
flow of air southeast from Pittsburgh, and this fed into a stronger
southerly flow that was paralleling the Atlantic coast just east of
the Appalachian Mountains. The balloon would have floated along in
this flow of air like a log floating down a river. As close as he
could estimate, he said, the balloon would arrive in the Gordonsville-
Blackstone area in the late afternoon or early evening. This was just
about the time the UFO had arrived.
"Probably a balloon" was a good enough answer for me.
The next morning at 8:00A.M., Al Chop called from the Pentagon to
tell me that people were crawling all over his desk wanting to know
about a sighting in Virginia.
The reports continued to come in. At Walnut Lake, Michigan, a group
of people with binoculars watched a "soft white light" go back and
forth across the western sky for nearly an hour. A UFO "paced" an Air
Force B-25 for thirty minutes in California. Both of these happened
on June 18, and although we checked and rechecked them, they came out
as unknowns.
On June 19 radar at Goose AFB in Newfoundland picked up some odd
targets. The targets came across the scope, suddenly enlarged, and
then became smaller again. One unofficial comment was that the object
was flat or disk-shaped, and that the radar target had gotten bigger
because the disk had banked in flight to present a greater reflecting
surface. ATIC's official comment was weather.
Goose AFB was famous for unusual reports. In early UFO history
someone had taken a very unusual colored photo of a "split cloud."
The photographer had seen a huge ball of fire streak down through the
sky and pass through a high layer of stratus clouds. As the fireball
passed through the cloud it cut out a perfect swath. The conclusion
was that the fireball was a meteor, but the case is still one of the
most interesting in the file because of the photograph.
Then in early 1952 there was another good report from this area. It
was an unknown.
The incident started when the pilot of an Air Force C-54 transport
radioed Goose AFB and said that at 10:42P.M. a large fireball had
buzzed his airplane. It had come in from behind the C-54, and nobody
had seen it until it was just off the left wing. The fireball was so
big that the pilot said it looked as if it was only a few hundred
feet away. The C-54 was 200 miles southwest, coming into Goose AFB
from Westover AFB, Massachusetts, when the incident occurred. The
base officer-of-the-day, who was also a pilot, happened to be in the
flight operations office at Goose when the message came in and he
overheard the report. He stepped outside, walked over to his command
car, and told his driver about the radio message, so the driver got
out and both of them looked toward the south. They searched the
horizon for a few seconds; then suddenly they saw a light closing in
from the southwest. Within a second, it was near the airfield. It had
increased in size till it was as big as a "golf ball at arm's
length," and it looked like a big ball of fire. It was so low that
both the OD and his driver dove under the command car because they
were sure it was going to hit the airfield. When they turned and
looked up they saw the fireball make a 90-degree turn over the
airfield and disappear into the northwest. The time was 10:47P.M.
The control tower operators saw the fireball too, but didn't agree
with the OD and his driver on how low it was. They did think that it
had made a 90-degree turn and they didn't think that it was a meteor.
In the years they'd been in towers they'd seen hundreds of meteors,
but they'd never seen anything like this, they reported.
And reports continued to pour into Project Blue Book. It was now not
uncommon to get ten or eleven wires in one day. If the letters
reporting UFO sightings were counted, the total would rise to twenty
or thirty a day. The majority of the reports that came in by wire
could be classified as being good. They were reports made by reliable
people and they were full of details. Some were reports of balloons,
airplanes, etc., but the percentage of unknowns hovered right around
22 per cent.
To describe and analyze each report, or even the unknowns, would
require a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, so I am covering
only the best and most representative cases.
One day in mid-June, Colonel Dunn called me. He was leaving for
Washington and he wanted me to come in the next day to give a
briefing at a meeting. By this time I was taking these briefings as a
matter of course. We usually gave the briefings to General Garland
and a general from the Research and Development Board, who passed the
information on to General Samford, the Director of Intelligence. But
this time General Samford, some of the members of his staff, two Navy
captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and some people I
can't name were at the briefing.
When I arrived in Washington, Major Fournet told me that the purpose of
the meetings, and my briefing, was to try to find out if there was any
significance to the almost alarming increase in UFO reports over the
past few weeks. By the time that everyone had finished signing into the
briefing room in the restricted area of the fourth-floor "B" ring of the
Pentagon, it was about 9:15A.M. I started my briefing as soon as
everyone was seated.
I reviewed the last month's UFO activities; then I briefly went over
the more outstanding "Unknown" UFO reports and pointed out how they
were increasing in number--breaking all previous records. I also
pointed out that even though the UFO subject was getting a lot of
publicity, it wasn't the scare-type publicity that had accompanied
the earlier flaps--in fact, much of the present publicity was anti-
saucer.
Then I went on to say that even though the reports we were getting
were detailed and contained a great deal of good data, we still had
no proof the UFO's were anything real. We could, I said, prove that
all UFO reports were merely the misinterpretation of known objects
_if_ we made a few assumptions.
At this point one of the colonels on General Samford's staff stopped
me. "Isn't it true," he asked, "that if you make a few positive
assumptions instead of negative assumptions you can just as easily
prove that the UFO's are interplanetary spaceships? Why, when you
have to make an assumption to get an answer to a report, do you
always pick the assumption that proves the UFO's don't exist?"