For several months the belief that Project Blue Book was taking a
negative attitude and the fact that the UFO's could be interplanetary
spaceships had been growing in the Pentagon, but these ideas were
usually discussed only in the privacy of offices with doors that
would close tight.
No one said anything, so the colonel who had broken the ice plunged
in. He used the sighting from Goose AFB, where the fireball had
buzzed the C-54 and sent the OD and his driver belly-whopping under
the command car as an example. The colonel pointed out that even
though we had labeled the report "Unknown" it wasn't accepted as
proof. He wanted to know why.
I said that our philosophy was that the fireball could have been two
meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across
the airfield at Goose AFB. Granted a meteor doesn't come within feet
of an airplane or make a 90-degree turn, but these could have been
optical illusions of some kind. The crew of the C-54, the OD, his
driver, and the tower operators didn't recognize the UFO's as meteors
because they were used to seeing the normal "shooting stars" that are
most commonly seen.
But the colonel had some more questions. "What are the chances of
having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling
the same direction, only five minutes apart?"
I didn't know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather
small, I had to admit.
Then he asked, "What kind of an optical illusion would cause a
meteor to appear to make a 90-degree turn?"
I had asked our Project Bear astronomer this same question, and he
couldn't answer it either. So the only answer I could give the
colonel was, "I don't know." I felt as if I were on a witness stand
being cross-examined, and that is exactly where I was, because the
colonel cut loose.
"Why not assume a point that is more easily proved?" he asked. "Why
not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower
operators did know what they were talking about? Maybe they had seen
spectacular meteors during the hundreds of hours that they had flown
at night and the many nights that they had been on duty in the tower.
Maybe the ball of fire had made a 90-degree turn. Maybe it was some
kind of an intelligently controlled craft that had streaked northeast
across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an
hour.
"Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?"
the colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.
This last comment started a lively discussion, and I was able to
retreat. The colonel had been right in a sense--we were being
conservative, but maybe this was the right way to be. In any
scientific investigation you always assume that you don't have enough
proof until you get a positive answer. I don't think that we had a
positive answer--yet.
The colonel's comments split the group, and a hot exchange of ideas,
pros and cons, and insinuations that some people were imitating
ostriches to keep from facing the truth followed.
The outcome of the meeting was a directive to take further steps to
obtain positive identification of the UFO's. Our original idea of
attempting to get several separate reports from one sighting so we
could use triangulation to measure speed, altitude, and size wasn't
working out. We had given the idea enough publicity, but reports
where triangulation could be used were few and far between. Mr. or
Mrs. Average Citizen just doesn't look up at the sky unless he or she
sees a flash of light or hears a sound. Then even if he or she does
look up and sees a UFO, it is very seldom that the report ever gets
to Project Blue Book. I think that it would be safe to say that Blue
Book only heard about 10 per cent of the UFO's that were seen in the
United States.
After the meeting I went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don
Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to some people about how
to get better UFO data. We brought back the idea of using an
extremely long focal-length camera equipped with a diffraction grating.
The cameras would be placed at various locations throughout the
United States where UFO's were most frequently seen. We hoped that
photos of the UFO's taken through the diffraction gratings would give
us some proof one way or the other.
The diffraction gratings we planned to use over the lenses of the
cameras were the same thing as prisms; they would split up the light
from the UFO into its component parts so that we could study it and
determine whether it was a meteor, an airplane, or balloon reflecting
sunlight, etc. Or we might be able to prove that the photographed UFO
was a craft completely foreign to our knowledge.
A red-hot, A-l priority was placed on the camera project, and a
section at ATIC that developed special equipment took over the job of
obtaining the cameras, or, if necessary, having them designed and
built.
But the UFO's weren't waiting around till they could be
photographed. Every day the tempo and confusion were increasing a
little more.
By the end of June it was very noticeable that most of the better
reports were coming from the eastern United States. In Massachusetts,
New Jersey, and Maryland jet fighters had been scrambled almost
nightly for a week. On three occasions radar-equipped F-94's had
locked on aerial targets only to have the lock-on broken by the
apparent violent maneuvers of the target.
By the end of June there was also a lull in the newspaper publicity
about the UFO's. The forthcoming political conventions had wiped out
any mention of flying saucers. But on July 1 there was a sudden
outbreak of good reports. The first one came from Boston; then they
worked down the coast.
About seven twenty-five on the morning of July 1 two F-94's were
scrambled to intercept a UFO that a Ground Observer Corps spotter
reported was traveling southwest across Boston. Radar couldn't pick
it up so the two airplanes were just vectored into the general area.
The F-94's searched the area but couldn't see anything. We got the
report at ATIC and would have tossed it out if it hadn't been for
other reports from the Boston area at that same time.
One of these reports came from a man and his wife at Lynn,
Massachusetts, nine miles northeast of Boston. At seven-thirty they
had noticed the two vapor trails from the climbing jet interceptors.
They looked around the sky to find out if they could see what the
jets were after and off to the west they saw a bright silver "cigar-
shaped object about six times as long as it was wide" traveling
southwest across Boston. It appeared to be traveling just a little
faster than the two jets. As they watched they saw that an identical
UFO was following the first one some distance back. The UFO's weren't
leaving vapor trails but, as the man mentioned in his report, this
didn't mean anything because you can get above the vapor trail level.
And the two UFO's appeared to be at a very high altitude. The two
observers watched as the two F-94's searched back and forth far below
the UFO's.
Then there was another report, also made at seven-thirty. An Air
Force captain was just leaving his home in Bedford, about 15 miles
northwest of Boston and straight west of Lynn, when he saw the two
jets. In his report he said that he, too, had looked around the sky
to see if he could see what they were trying to intercept when off to
the east he saw a "silvery cigar-shaped object" traveling south. His
description of what he observed was almost identical to what the
couple in Lynn reported except that he saw only one UFO.
When we received the report, I wanted to send someone up to Boston
immediately in the hope of getting more data from the civilian couple
and the Air Force captain; this seemed to be a tailor-made case for
triangulation. But by July 1 we were completely snowed under with
reports, and there just wasn't anybody to send. Then, to complicate
matters, other reports came in later in the day.
Just two hours after the sighting in the Boston area Fort Monmouth,
New Jersey, popped back into UFO history. At nine-thirty in the
morning twelve student radar operators and three instructors were
tracking nine jets on an SCR 584 radar set when two UFO targets
appeared on the scope. The two targets came in from the northeast at
a slow speed, much slower than the jets that were being tracked,
hovered near Fort Monmouth at 50,000 feet for about five minutes, and
then took off in a "terrific burst of speed" to the southwest.
When the targets first appeared, some of the class went outside with
an instructor, and after searching the sky for about a minute, they
saw two shiny objects in the same location as the radar showed the
two unidentified targets to be. They watched the two UFO's for
several minutes and saw them go zipping off to the southwest at
exactly the same time that the two radar targets moved off the scope
in that direction.
We had plotted these reports, the ones from Boston and the one from
Fort Monmouth, on a map, and without injecting any imagination or
wild assumptions, it looked as if two "somethings" had come down
across Boston on a southwesterly heading, crossed Long Island,
hovered for a few minutes over the Army's secret laboratories at Fort
Monmouth, then proceeded toward Washington. In a way we half expected
to get a report from Washington. Our expectations were rewarded
because in a few hours a report arrived from that city.
A physics professor at George Washington University reported a
"dull, gray, smoky-colored" object which hovered north northwest of
Washington for about eight minutes. Every once in a while, the
professor reported, it would move through an arc of about 15 degrees
to the right or left, but it always returned to its original
position. While he was watching the UFO he took a 25-cent piece out
of his pocket and held it at arm's length so that he could compare
its size to that of the UFO. The UFO was about half the diameter of
the quarter. When he first saw the UFO, it was about 30 to 40 degrees
above the horizon, but during the eight minutes it was in sight it
steadily dropped lower and lower until buildings in downtown
Washington blocked off the view.
Besides being an "Unknown," this report was exceptionally
interesting to us because the sighting was made from the center of
downtown Washington, D.C. The professor reported that he had noticed
the UFO when he saw people all along the street looking up in the air
and pointing. He estimated that at least 500 people were looking at
it, yet his was the only report we received. This seemed to
substantiate our theory that people are very hesitant to report UFO's
to the Air Force. But they evidently do tell the newspapers because
later on we picked up a short account of the sighting in the
Washington papers. It merely said that hundreds of calls had been
received from people reporting a UFO.
When reports were pouring in at the rate of twenty or thirty a day,
we were glad that people were hesitant to report UFO's, but when we
were trying to find the answer to a really knotty sighting we always
wished that more people had reported it. The old adage of having your
cake and eating it, too, held even for the UFO.
Technically no one in Washington, besides, of course, Major General
Samford and his superiors, had anything to do with making policy
decisions about the operation of Project Blue Book or the handling of
the UFO situation in general. Nevertheless, everyone was trying to
get into the act. The split in opinions on what to do about the
rising tide of UFO reports, the split that first came out in the open
at General Samford's briefing, was widening every day. One group was
getting dead-serious about the situation. They thought we now had
plenty of evidence to back up an official statement that the UFO's
were something real and, to be specific, not something from this
earth. This group wanted Project Blue Book to quit spending time
investigating reports from the standpoint of trying to determine if
the observer of a UFO had actually seen something foreign to our
knowledge and start assuming that he or she had. They wanted me to
aim my investigation at trying to find out more about the UFO. Along
with this switch in operating policy, they wanted to clamp down on
the release of information. They thought that the security
classification of the project should go up to Top Secret until we had
all of the answers, then the information should be released to the
public. The investigation of UFO's along these lines should be a
maximum effort, they thought, and their plans called for lining up
many top scientists to devote their full time to the project. Someone
once said that enthusiasm is infectious, and he was right. The
enthusiasm of this group took a firm hold in the Pentagon, at Air
Defense Command Headquarters, on the Research and Development Board,
and many other agencies throughout the government. But General
Samford was still giving the orders, and he said to continue to
operate just as we had--keeping an open mind to any ideas.
After the minor flurry of reports on July 1 we had a short breathing
spell and found time to clean up a sizable backlog of reports. People
were still seeing UFO's but the frequency of the sighting curve was
dropping steadily. During the first few days of July we were getting
only two or three good reports a day.
On July 5 the crew of a non-scheduled airliner made page two of many
newspapers by reporting a UFO over the AEC's supersecret Hanford,
Washington, installation. It was a skyhook balloon. On the twelfth a
huge meteor sliced across Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri
that netted us twenty or thirty reports. Even before they had stopped
coming in, we had confirmation from our astronomer that the UFO was a
meteor.
But forty-two minutes later there was a sighting in Chicago that
wasn't so easily explained.
According to our weather records, on the night of July 12 it was hot
in Chicago. At nine forty-two there were at least 400 people at
Montrose Beach trying to beat the heat. Many of them were lying down
looking at the stars, so that they saw the UFO as it came in from the
west northwest, made a 180-degree turn directly over their heads, and
disappeared over the horizon. It was a "large red light with small
white lights on the side," most of the people reported. Some of them
said that it changed to a single yellow light as it made its turn. It
was in sight about five minutes, and during this time no one reported
hearing any sound.
One of the people at the beach was the weather officer from O'Hare
International Airport, an Air Force captain. He immediately called
O'Hare. They checked on balloon flights and with radar, but both were
negative; radar said that there had been no aircraft in the area of
Montrose Beach for several hours.
I sent an investigator to Chicago, and although he came back with a
lot of data on the sighting, it didn't add up to be anything known.
The next day Dayton had its first UFO sighting in a long time when a
Mr. Roy T. Ellis, president of the Rubber Seal Products Company, and
many other people, reported a teardrop-shaped object that hovered
over Dayton for several minutes about midnight. This sighting had an
interesting twist because two years later I was in Dayton and stopped
in at ATIC to see a friend who is one of the technical advisers at
the center.
Naturally the conversation got around to the subject of UFO's, and
he asked me if I remembered this specific sighting. I did, so he went
on to say that he and his wife had seen this UFO that night but they
had never told anybody. He was very serious when he admitted that he
had no idea what it could have been. Now I'd heard this statement a
thousand times before from other people, but coming from this person,
it was really something because he was as anti-saucer as anyone I
knew. Then he added, "From that time on I didn't think your saucer
reporters were as crazy as I used to think they were."
The Dayton sighting also created quite a stir in the press. In
conjunction with the sighting, the Dayton Daily _Journal_ had
interviewed Colonel Richard H. Magee, the Dayton-Oakwood civil
defense director; they wanted to know what he thought about the
UFO's. The colonel's answer made news: "There's something flying
around in our skies and we wish we knew what it was."
When the story broke in other papers, the colonel's affiliation with
civil defense wasn't mentioned, and he became merely "a colonel from
Dayton." Dayton was quickly construed by the public to mean Wright-
Patterson AFB and specifically ATIC. Some people in the Pentagon
screamed while others gleefully clapped their hands. The gleeful
handclaps were from those people who wanted the UFO's to be socially
recognized, and they believed that if they couldn't talk their ideas
into being they might be able to force them in with the help of this
type of publicity.
The temporary lull in reporting that Project Blue Book had
experienced in early July proved to be only the calm before the
storm. By mid-July we were getting about twenty reports a day plus
frantic calls from intelligence officers all over the United States
as every Air Force installation in the U.S. was being swamped with
reports. We told the intelligence officers to send in the ones that
sounded the best.
The build-up in UFO reports wasn't limited to the United States--
every day we would receive reports from our air attaches in other
countries. England and France led the field, with the South American
countries running a close third. Needless to say, we didn't
investigate or evaluate foreign reports because we had our hands full
right at home.
Most of us were putting in fourteen hours a day, six days a week. It
wasn't at all uncommon for Lieutenant Andy Flues, Bob Olsson, or
Kerry Rothstien, my investigators, to get their sleep on an airliner
going out or coming back from an investigation. TWA airliners out of
Dayton were more like home than home. But we hadn't seen anything yet.
All the reports that were coming in were good ones, ones with no
answers. Unknowns were running about 40 percent. Rumors persist that
in mid-July 1952 the Air Force was braced for an expected invasion by
flying saucers. Had these rumormongers been at ATIC in mid-July they
would have thought that the invasion was already in full swing. And
they would have thought that one of the beachheads for the invasion
was Patrick AFB, the Air Force's Guided Missile Long-Range Proving
Ground on the east coast of Florida.
On the night of July 18, at ten forty-five, two officers were
standing in front of base operations at Patrick when they noticed a
light at about a 45-degree angle from the horizon and off to the
west. It was an amber color and "quite a bit brighter than a star."
Both officers had heard flying saucer stories, and both thought the
light was a balloon. But, to be comedians, they called to several
more officers and airmen inside the operations office and told them
to come out and "see the flying saucer." The people came out and
looked. A few were surprised and took the mysterious light seriously,
at the expense of considerable laughter from the rest of the group.
The discussion about the light grew livelier and bets that it was a
balloon were placed. In the meantime the light had drifted over the
base, had stopped for about a minute, turned, and was now heading
north. To settle the bet, one of the officers stepped into the base
weather office to find out about the balloon. Yes, one was in the air
and being tracked by radar, he was told. The weather officer said
that he would call to find out exactly where it was. He called and
found out that the weather balloon was being tracked due west of the
base and that the light had gone out about ten minutes before. The
officer went back outside to find that what was first thought to be a
balloon was now straight north of the field and still lighted. To add
to the confusion, a second amber light had appeared in the west about
20 degrees lower than where the first one was initially seen, and it
was also heading north but at a much greater speed. In a few seconds
the first light stopped and started moving back south over the base.
While the group of officers and airmen were watching the two lights,
the people from the weather office came out to tell the UFO observers
that the balloon was still traveling straight west. They were just in
time to see a third light come tearing across the sky, directly
overhead, from west to east. A weatherman went inside and called the
balloon-tracking crew again--their balloon was still far to the west
of the base.
Inside of fifteen minutes two more amber lights came in from the
west, crossed the base, made a 180-degree turn over the ocean, and
came back over the observers.
In the midst of the melee a radar set had been turned on but it
couldn't pick up any targets. This did, however, eliminate the
possibility of the lights' being aircraft. They weren't stray
balloons either, because the winds at all altitudes were blowing in a
westerly direction. They obviously weren't meteors. They weren't
searchlights on a haze layer because there was no weather conducive
to forming a haze layer and there were no searchlights. They could
have been some type of natural phenomenon, if one desires to take the
negative approach. Or, if you take the positive approach, they could
have been spaceships.
The next night radar at Washington National Airport picked up UFO's
and one of the most highly publicized sightings of UFO history was in
the making. It marked the beginning of the end of the Big Flap.