By early January 1953 the scientists who were to be members of our
panel of experts had been contacted and had agreed to sit in judgment
of the UFO. In turn, we agreed to give them every detail about the UFO.
We had our best reports for them to read, and we were going to show
them the two movies that some intelligence officers considered as the
"positive proof"--the Tremonton Movie and the Montana Movie.
When this high court convened on the morning of January 12, the
first thing it received was its orders; one of three verdicts would
be acceptable:
All UFO reports are explainable as known objects or natural
phenomena; therefore the investigation should be permanently
discontinued.
The UFO reports do not contain enough data upon which to base a
final conclusion. Project Blue Book should be continued in hopes of
obtaining better data.
The UFO's are interplanetary spacecraft.
The written verdict, the group was told, would be given to the
National Security Council, a council made up of the directors of all
U.S. intelligence agencies, and thence it would go to the President
of the United States--if they should decide that the UFO's were
interplanetary spacecraft.
Because of military regulations, the names of the panel members,
like the names of so many other people associated with the UFO story,
cannot be revealed. Two of the men had made names for themselves as
practical physicists--they could transform the highest theory for
practical uses. One of these men had developed the radar that pulled
us out of a big hole at the beginning of World War II, and the other
had been one of the fathers of the H-bomb. Another of the panel
members is now the chief civilian adviser to one of our top military
commanders, and another was an astronomer whose unpublished fight to
get the UFO recognized is respected throughout scientific circles.
There was a man who is noted for his highly theoretical physics and
mathematics, and another who had pioneered operations research during
World War II. The sixth member of the panel had been honored by the
American Rocket Society and the International Astronautical
Federation for his work in moving space travel from the Buck Rogers
realm to the point of near reality and who is now a rocket expert.
It was an impressive collection of top scientific talent.
During the first two days of the meeting I reviewed our findings for
the scientists. Since June 1947, when the first UFO report had been
made, ATIC had analyzed 1,593 UFO reports. About 4,400 had actually
been received, but all except 1,593 had been immediately rejected for
analysis. From our studies, we estimated that ATIC received reports
of only 10 per cent of the UFO sightings that were made in the United
States, therefore in five and a half years something like 44,000 UFO
sightings had been made.
Of the 1,593 reports that had been analyzed by Project Blue Book,
and we had studied and evaluated every report in the Air Force files,
we had been able to explain a great many. The actual breakdown was
like this:
_Balloons_.....................18.51%
Known 1.57
Probable 4.99
Possible 11.95
18.51
_Aircraft_.....................11.76%
Known 0.98
Probable 7.74
Possible 3.04
11.76
_Astronomical_ _Bodies_........14.20%
Known 2.79
Probable 4.01
Possible 7.40
14.20
_Other_ ........................4.21%
Searchlights on clouds, birds, blowing paper, inversions,
reflections, etc.
_Hoaxes_........................1.66%
_Insufficient_ _data_..........22.72%
(In addition to those initially eliminated)
_Unknowns_.....................26.94%
By using the terms "Known," "Probable," and "Possible," we were able
to differentiate how positive we were of our conclusions. But even in
the "Possible" cases we were, in our own minds, sure that we had
identified the reported UFO.
And who made these reports? Pilots and air crews made 17.1 per cent
from the air. Scientists and engineers made 5.7 per cent, airport
control tower operators made an even 1.0 per cent of the reports, and
12.5 per cent of the total were radar reports. The remaining 63.7 per
cent were made by military and civilian observers in general.
The reports that we were interested in were the 26.94 per cent or
429 "Unknowns," so we had studied them in great detail. We studied
the reported colors of the UFO's, the shapes, the directions they
were traveling, the times of day they were observed, and many more
details, but we could find no significant pattern or trends. We did
find that the most often reported shape was elliptical and that the
most often reported color was white or "metallic." About the same
number of UFO's were reported as being seen in daytime as at night,
and the direction of travel equally covered the sixteen cardinal
headings of the compass.
Seventy per cent of the "Unknowns" had been seen visually from the
air; 12 per cent had been seen visually from the ground; 10 per cent
had been picked up by ground or airborne radar; and 8 per cent were
combination visual-radar sightings.
In the over-all total of 1,593 sightings women made two reports for
every one made by a man, but in the "Unknowns" the men beat out women
ten to one.
There were two other factors we could never resolve, the frequency
of the sightings and their geographical distribution. Since the first
flurry of reports in July of 1947, each July brought a definite peak
in reports; then a definite secondary peak occurred just before each
Christmas. We plotted these peaks in sightings against high tides,
world-wide atomic tests, the positions of the moon and planets, the
general cloudiness over the United States, and a dozen and one other
things, but we could never say what caused more people to see UFO's
at certain times of the year.
Then the UFO's were habitually reported from areas around
"technically interesting" places like our atomic energy
installations, harbors, and critical manufacturing areas. Our studies
showed that such vital military areas as Strategic Air Command and
Air Defense Command bases, some A-bomb storage areas, and large
military depots actually produced fewer reports than could be
expected from a given area in the United States. Large population
centers devoid of any major "technically interesting" facilities also
produced few reports.
According to the laws of normal distribution, if UFO's are not
intelligently controlled vehicles, the distribution of reports should
have been similar to the distribution of population in the United
States--it wasn't.
Our study of the geographical locations of sightings also covered
other countries. The U.S. by no means had a curb on the UFO market.
In all of our "Unknown" reports we never found one measurement of
size, speed, or altitude that could be considered to be even fairly
accurate. We could say only that some of the UFO's had been traveling
pretty fast.
As far as radar was concerned, we had reports of fantastic speeds--
up to 50,000 miles an hour--but in all of these instances there was
some doubt as to exactly what caused the target. The highest speeds
reported for our combination radar-visual sightings, which we
considered to be the best type of sighting in our files, were 700 to
800 miles an hour.
We had never picked up any "hardware"--any whole saucers, pieces, or
parts--that couldn't be readily identified as being something very
earthly. We had a contract with a materials-testing laboratory, and
they would analyze any piece of material that we found or was sent to
us. The tar-covered marble, aluminum broom handle, cow manure, slag,
pieces of plastic balloon, and the what-have-you that we did receive
and analyze only served to give the people in our material lab some
practice and added nothing but laughs to the UFO project.
The same went for the reports of "contacts" with spacemen. Since
1952 a dozen or so people have claimed that they have talked to or
ridden with the crews of flying saucers. They offer affidavits,
pieces of material, photographs, and other bits and pieces of junk as
proof. We investigated some of these reports and could find
absolutely no fact behind the stories.
We had a hundred or so photos of flying saucers, both stills and
movies. Many were fakes--some so expert that it took careful study by
photo interpreters to show how the photos had been faked. Some were
the crudest of fakes, automobile hub caps thrown into the air,
homemade saucers suspended by threads, and just plain retouched
negatives. The rest of the still photos had been sent in by well-
meaning citizens who couldn't recognize a light flare of flaw in the
negative, or who had chanced to get an excellent photo of a sundog or
mirage.
But the movies that were sent in to us were different. In the first
place, it takes an expert with elaborate equipment to fake a movie.
We had or knew about four strips of movie film that fell into the
"Unknown" category. Two were the cinetheodolite movies that had been
taken at White Sands Proving Ground in April and May of 1950, one was
the Montana Movie and the last was the Tremonton Movie. These latter
two had been subjected to thousands of hours of analysis, and since
we planned to give the panel of scientists more thorough reports on
them on Friday, I skipped over their details and went to the next
point I wanted to cover--theories.
Periodically throughout the history of the UFO people have come up
with widely publicized theories to explain all UFO reports. The one
that received the most publicity was the one offered by Dr. Donald
Menzel of Harvard University. Dr. Menzel, writing in _Time_, _Look_,
and later in his _Flying_ _Saucers_, claimed that all UFO reports
could be explained as various types of light phenomena. We studied
this theory thoroughly because it did seem to have merit. Project
Bear's physicists studied it. ATIC's scientific consultants studied
it and discussed it with several leading European physicists whose
specialty was atmospheric physics. In general the comments that
Project Blue Book received were, "He's given the subject some thought
but his explanations are not the panacea."
And there were other widely publicized theories. One man said that
they were all skyhook balloons, but we knew the flight path of every
skyhook balloon and they were seldom reported as UFO's. Their little
brothers, the weather balloons, caused us a great deal more trouble.
The Army Engineers took a crack at solving the UFO problem by making
an announcement that a scientist in one of their laboratories had
duplicated a flying saucer in his laboratory. Major Dewey Fournet
checked into this one. It had all started out as a joke, but it was
picked up as fact and the scientist was stuck with it. He gained some
publicity but lost prestige because other scientists wondered just
how competent the man really was to try to pass off such an answer.
All in all, the unsolicited assistance of theorists didn't help us a
bit, I told the panel members. Some of them were evidently familiar
with the theories because they nodded their heads in agreement.
The next topic I covered in my briefing was a question that came up
quite frequently in discussions of the UFO: Did UFO reports actually
start in 1947? We had spent a great deal of time trying to resolve
this question. Old newspaper files, journals, and books that we found
in the Library of Congress contained many reports of odd things being
seen in the sky as far back as the Biblical times. The old Negro
spiritual says, "Ezekiel saw a wheel 'way up in the middle of the
air." We couldn't substantiate Ezekiel's sighting because many of the
very old reports of odd things observed in the sky could be explained
as natural phenomena that weren't fully understood in those days.
The first documented reports of sightings similar to the UFO
sightings as we know them today appeared in the newspapers of 1896.
In fact, the series of sightings that occurred in that year and the
next had many points of similarity with the reports of today.
The sightings started in the San Francisco Bay area on the evening
of November 22, 1896, when hundreds of people going home from work
saw a large, dark, "cigar-shaped object with stubby wings" traveling
northwest across Oakland.
Within hours after the mystery craft had disappeared over what is
now the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, the stories of people
in other northern California towns began to come in on the telegraph
wires. The citizens of Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Chico, and Red Bluff--
several thousand of them--saw it.
I tried to find out if the people in these outlying communities saw
the UFO before they heard the news from the San Francisco area or
afterward, but trying to run down the details of a fifty-six-year-old
UFO report is almost hopeless. Once while I was on a trip to Hamilton
AFB I called the offices of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ and they
put me in touch with a retired employee who had worked on a San
Francisco paper in 1896. I called the old gentleman on the phone and
talked to him for a long time. He had been a copy boy at the time and
remembered the incident, but time had canceled out the details. He
did tell me that he, the editor of the paper, and the news staff had
seen "the ship," as he referred to the UFO. His story, even though it
was fifty-six years old, smacked of others I'd heard when he said
that no one at the newspaper ever told anyone what they had seen;
they didn't want people to think that they were "crazy."
On November 30 the mystery ship was back over the San Francisco area
and those people who had maintained that people were being fooled by
a wag in a balloon became believers when the object was seen moving
into the wind.
For four months reports came in from villages, cities, and farms in
the West; then the Midwest, as the airship "moved eastward." In early
April of 1897 people in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, and Illinois reported seeing it. On April 10 it was
reported to be over Chicago. Reports continued to come in to the
newspapers until about April 20; then it, or stories about it, were
gone. Literally thousands of people had seen it before the last
report clicked in over the telegraph wires.
A study of the hundreds of newspaper accounts of this sighting that
rocked the world in the late 1890's was interesting because the same
controversies that arose then exist now. Those who hadn't seen the
stubby-winged, cigar-shaped "craft" said, "Phooey," or the nineteenth-
century version thereof. Those who had seen it were almost ready to
do battle to uphold their integrity. Some astronomers loudly yelled,
"Venus," "Jupiter," and "Alpha Orionis" while others said, "We saw
it." Thomas Edison, _the_ man of science of the day, disclaimed any
knowledge of the mystery craft. "I prefer to devote my time to
objects of commercial value," he told a New York _Herald_ reporter.
"At best airships would only be toys."
Thomas--you goofed on that prediction.
I had one more important point to cover before I finished my
briefing and opened the meeting to a general question-and-answer
session.
During the past year and a half we had had several astronomers visit
Project Blue Book, and they were not at all hesitant to give us their
opinions but they didn't care to say much about what their colleagues
were thinking, although they did indicate that they were thinking. We
decided that the opinions and comments of astronomers would be of
value, so late in 1952 we took a poll. We asked an astronomer, whom
we knew to be unbiased about the UFO problem and who knew every
outstanding astronomer in the United States, to take a trip and talk
to his friends. We asked him not to make a point of asking about the
UFO but just to work the subject into a friendly conversation. This
way we hoped to get a completely frank opinion. To protect his fellow
astronomers, our astronomer gave them all code names and he kept the
key to the code.
The report we received expressed the detailed opinions of forty-five
recognized authorities. Their opinions varied from that of Dr. C, who
regarded the UFO project as a "silly waste of money to investigate an
even sillier subject," to Dr. L, who has spent a great deal of his
own valuable time personally investigating UFO reports because he
believes that they are something "real." Of the forty-five
astronomers who were interviewed, 36 per cent were not at all
interested in the UFO reports, 41 per cent were interested to the
point of offering their services if they were ever needed, and 23 per
cent thought that the UFO's were a much more serious problem than
most people recognized.
None of the astronomers, even during a friendly discussion, admitted
that he thought the UFO's could be interplanetary vehicles. All of
those who were interested would only go so far as to say, "We don't
know what they are, but they're something real."
During the past few years I have heard it said that if the UFO's
were really "solid objects" our astronomers would have seen them. Our
study shed some light on this point--astronomers have seen UFO's.
None of them has ever seen or photographed anything resembling a UFO
through his telescope, but 11 per cent of the forty-five men had seen
something that they couldn't explain. Although, technically speaking,
these sightings were no better than hundreds of others in our files
as far as details were concerned, they were good because of the
caliber of the observer. Astronomers know what is in the sky.
It is interesting to note that out of the representative cross
section of astronomers, five of them, or 11 per cent, had sighted
UFO's. For a given group of people this is well above average. To
check this point, the astronomer who was making our study picked
ninety people at random--people he met while traveling--and got them
into a conversation about flying saucers. These people were his
"control group," to borrow a term from the psychologists. Although
the percentage of people who were interested in UFO's was higher for
the control group than for the group of astronomers, only 41 per cent
of the astronomers were interested while 86 per cent of the control
group were interested; 11 per cent of the astronomers had seen UFO's,
while only about 1 per cent of the control group had seen one. This
seemed to indicate that as a group astronomers see many more UFO's
than the average citizen.
When I finished my briefing, it was too late to start the question-
and-answer session, so the first day's meeting adjourned. But
promptly at nine o'clock the next morning the group was again
gathered, and from the looks of the list of questions some of them
had, they must have been thinking about UFO's all night.
One of the first questions was about the results of photography
taken by the pairs of huge "meteorite patrol" cameras that are
located in several places throughout North America. Did they ever
photograph a UFO? The cameras, which are in operation almost every
clear night, can photograph very dim lights, and once a light is
photographed its speed and altitude can be very accurately
established. If there were any objects giving off light as they flew
through our atmosphere, there is a chance that these cameras might
have photographed them. But they hadn't.
At first this seemed to be an important piece of evidence and we had
just about racked this fact up as a definite score against the UFO
when we did a little checking. If the UFO had been flying at an
altitude of 100 miles, the chances of its being picked up by the
cameras would be good, but the chances of photographing something
flying any lower would be less.
This may account for the fact that while our "inquiring astronomer"
was at the meteorite patrol camera sites, he talked to an astronomer
who had seen a UFO while operating one of the patrol cameras.
Many people have asked why our astronomers haven't seen anything
through their big telescopes. They are focused light-years away and
their field of vision is so narrow that even if UFO's did exist and
littered the atmosphere they wouldn't be seen.
Another question the panel had was about Orson Welles' famous _War_
_of_ _the_ _Worlds_ broadcast of October 1938, which caused thousands
of people to panic. Had we studied this to see if there were any
similarities between it and the current UFO reporting?
We had.
Our psychologist looked into the matter and gave us an opinion--to
make a complete study and get a positive answer would require an
effort that would dwarf the entire UFO project. But he did have a few
comments. There were many documented cases in which a series of
innocent circumstances triggered by the broadcast had caused people
to completely lose all sense of good judgment--to panic. There were
some similar reports in our UFO files.
But we had many reports in which people reported UFO's and obviously
hadn't panicked. Reports from pilots who had seen mysterious lights
at night and, thinking that they might be a cockpit reflection, had
turned off all their cockpit lights. Or the pilots who turned and
rolled their airplanes to see if they could change the angle of
reflection and get rid of the UFO. Or those pilots who climbed and
dove thousands of feet and then leveled out to see if the UFO would
change its relative position to the airplane. Or the amateur
astronomer who made an excellent sighting and before he reluctantly
reported it as a UFO had talked to a half dozen professional
astronomers and physicists in hopes of finding an explanation. All of
these people were thinking clearly, questioning themselves as to what
the sightings could be; then trying to answer their questions. These
people weren't panicked.
The question-and-answer period went on for a full day as the
scientists dug into the details of the general facts I had given them
in my briefing.
The following day and a half was devoted to reviewing and discussing
fifty of our best sighting reports that we had classed as "Unknowns."
The next item on the agenda, when the panel had finished absorbing
all of the details of the fifty selected top reports, was a review of
a very hot and very highly controversial study. It was based on the
idea that Major Dewey Fournet and I had talked about several months
before--an analysis of the motions of the reported UFO's in an
attempt to determine whether they were intelligently controlled. The
study was hot because it wasn't official and the reason it wasn't
official was because it was so hot. It concluded that the UFO's were
interplanetary spaceships. The report had circulated around high
command levels of intelligence and it had been read with a good deal
of interest. But even though some officers at command levels just a
notch below General Samford bought it, the space behind the words
"Approved by" was blank--no one would stick his neck out and
officially send it to the top.
Dewey Fournet, who had completed his tour of active duty in the Air
Force and was now a civilian, was called from Houston, Texas, to tell
the scientists about the study since he had worked very closely with
the group that had prepared it.
The study covered several hundred of our most detailed UFO reports.
By a very critical process of elimination, based on the motion of the
reported UFO's, Fournet told the panel how he and any previous
analysis by Project Blue Book had been disregarded and how those
reports that could have been caused by any one of the many dozen
known objects--balloons, airplanes, astronomical bodies, etc., were
sifted out. This sifting took quite a toll, and the study ended up
with only ten or twenty reports that fell into the "Unknown"
category. Since such critical methods of evaluation had been used,
these few reports proved beyond a doubt that the UFO's were
intelligently controlled by persons with brains equal to or far
surpassing ours.
The next step in the study, Fournet explained, was to find out where
they came from. "Earthlings" were eliminated, leaving the final
answer--spacemen.
Both Dewey and I had been somewhat worried about how the panel would
react to a study with such definite conclusions. But when he finished
his presentation, it was obvious from the tone of the questioning
that the men were giving the conclusions serious thought. Fournet's
excellent reputation was well known.
On Friday morning we presented the feature attractions of the
session, the Tremonton Movie and the Montana Movie. These two bits of
evidence represented the best photos of UFO's that Project Blue Book
had to offer. The scientists knew about them, especially the
Tremonton Movie, because since late July they had been the subject of
many closed-door conferences. Generals, admirals, and GS-16's had
seen them at "command performances," and they had been flown to Kelly
AFB in Texas to be shown to a conference of intelligence officers
from all over the world. Two of the country's best military photo
laboratories, the Air Force lab at Wright Field and the Navy's lab at
Anacostia, Maryland, had spent many hours trying to prove that the
UFO's were balloons, airplanes, or stray light reflections, but they
failed--the UFO's were true unknowns. The possibility that the movie
had been faked was considered but quickly rejected because only a
Hollywood studio with elaborate equipment could do such a job and the
people who filmed the movies didn't have this kind of equipment.
The Montana Movie had been taken on August 15, 1950, by Nick
Mariana, the manager of the Great Falls baseball team. It showed two
large bright lights flying across the blue sky in an echelon
formation. There were no clouds in the movie to give an indication of
the UFO's speed, but at one time they passed behind a water tower.
The lights didn't show any detail; they appeared to be large circular
objects.
Mariana had sent his movies to the Air Force back in 1950, but in
1950 there was no interest in the UFO so, after a quick viewing,
Project Grudge had written them off as "the reflections from two F-94
jet fighters that were in the area."
In 1952, at the request of the Pentagon, I reopened the
investigation of the Montana Movie. Working through an intelligence
officer at the Great Falls AFB, I had Mariana reinterrogated and
obtained a copy of his movie, which I sent to the photo lab.
When the photo lab got the movie, they had a little something to
work with because the two UFO's had passed behind a reference point,
the water tower. Their calculations quickly confirmed that the
objects were not birds, balloons, or meteors. Balloons drift with the
wind and the wind was not blowing in the direction that the two UFO's
were traveling. No exact speeds could be measured, but the lab could
determine that the lights were traveling too fast to be birds and too
slow to be meteors.
This left airplanes as the only answer. The intelligence officer at
Great Falls had dug through huge stacks of files and found that only
two airplanes, two F-94's, were near the city during the sighting and
that they had landed about two minutes afterwards. Both Mariana and
his secretary, who had also seen the UFO's, had said that the two
jets had appeared in another part of the sky only a minute or two
after the two UFO's had disappeared in the southeast. This in itself
would eliminate the jets as candidates for the UFO's, but we wanted
to double-check. The two circular lights didn't look like F-94's, but
anyone who has done any flying can tell you that an airplane so far
away that it can't be seen can suddenly catch the sun's rays and make
a brilliant flash.
First we studied the flight paths of the two F-94's. We knew the
landing pattern that was being used on the day of the sighting, and
we knew when the two F-94's landed. The two jets just weren't
anywhere close to where the two UFO's had been. Next we studied each
individual light and both appeared to be too steady to be reflections.
We drew a blank on the Montana Movie--it was an unknown.
We also drew a blank on the Tremonton Movie, a movie that had been
taken by a Navy Chief Photographer, Warrant Officer Delbert C.
Newhouse, on July 2, 1952.
Our report on the incident showed that Newhouse, his wife, and their
two children were driving to Oakland, California, from the east coast
on this eventful day. They had just passed through Tremonton, Utah, a
town north of Salt Lake City, and had traveled about 7 miles on U.S.
Highway 30S when Mrs. Newhouse noticed a group of objects in the sky.
She pointed them out to her husband; he looked, pulled over to the
side of the road, stopped the car, and jumped out to get a better
look. He didn't have to look very long to realize that something
highly unusual was taking place because in his twenty-one years in
the Navy and 2,000 hours' flying time as an aerial photographer, he'd
never seen anything like this. About a dozen shiny disklike objects
were "milling around the sky in a rough formation."
Newhouse had his movie camera so he turned the turret around to a 3-
inch telephoto lens and started to photograph the UFO's. He held the
camera still and took several feet of film, getting all of the bright
objects in one photo. All of the UFO's had stayed in a compact group
from the time the Newhouse family had first seen them, but just
before they disappeared over the western horizon one of them left the
main group and headed east. Newhouse swung his camera around and took
several shots of it, holding his camera steady and letting the UFO
pass through the field of view before it disappeared in the east.
When I received the Tremonton films I took them right over to the
Wright Field photo lab, along with the Montana Movie, and the photo
technicians and I ran them twenty or thirty times. The two movies
were similar in that in both of them the objects appeared to be large
circular lights--in neither one could you see any detail. But, unlike
the Montana Movie, the lights in the Tremonton Movie would fade out,
then come back in again. This fading immediately suggested airplanes
reflecting light, but the roar of a king-sized dogfight could have
been heard for miles and the Newhouse family had heard no sound. We
called in several fighter pilots and they watched the UFO's circling
and darting in and out in the cloudless blue sky. Their unqualified
comment was that no airplane could do what the UFO's were doing.
Balloons came under suspicion, but the lab eliminated them just as
quickly by studying the kind of a reflection given off by a balloon--
it is a steady reflection since a balloon is spherical. Then, to
further scuttle the balloon theory, clusters of balloons are tied
together and don't mill around. Of course, the lone UFO that took off
to the east by itself was the biggest argument against balloons.
Newhouse told an intelligence officer from the Western Air Defense
Forces that he had held his camera still and let this single UFO fly
through the field of view, so the people in the lab measured its
angular velocity. Unfortunately there were no clouds in the sky, nor
was he able to include any of the ground in the pictures, so our
estimates of angular velocity had to be made assuming that the
photographer held his camera still. Had the lone UFO been 10 miles
away it would have been traveling several thousand miles an hour.
After studying the movies for several weeks, the Air Force photo lab
at Wright Field gave up. All they had to say was, "We don't know what
they are but they aren't airplanes or balloons, and we don't think
they are birds."
While the lab had been working on the movies at Wright Field, Major
Fournet had been talking to the Navy photo people at Anacostia; they
thought they had some good ideas on how to analyze the movies, so as
soon as we were through with them I sent them to Major Fournet and he
took them over to the Navy lab.
The Navy lab spent about two months studying the films and had just
completed their analysis. The men who had done the work were on hand
to brief the panel of scientists on their analysis after the panel
had seen the movies.
We darkened the room and I would imagine that we ran each film ten
times before every panel member was satisfied that he had seen and
could remember all of the details. We ran both films together so that
the men could compare them.
The Navy analysts didn't use the words "interplanetary spacecraft"
when they told of their conclusions, but they did say that the UFO's
were intelligently controlled vehicles and that they weren't
airplanes or birds. They had arrived at this conclusion by making a
frame-by-frame study of the motion of the lights and the changes in
the lights' intensity.
When the Navy people had finished with their presentation, the
scientists had questions. None of the panel members were trying to
find fault with the work the Navy people had done, but they weren't
going to accept the study until they had meticulously searched for
every loophole. Then they found one.
In measuring the brilliance of the lights, the photo analysts had
used an instrument called a densitometer. The astronomer on the panel
knew all about measuring the density of an extremely small
photographic image with a densitometer because he did it all the time
in his studies of the stars. And the astronomer didn't think that the
Navy analysts had used the correct technique in making their
measurements. This didn't necessarily mean that their data were all
wrong, but it did mean that they should recheck their work.
When the discussion of the Navy's report ended, one of the
scientists asked to see the Tremonton Movie again; so I had the
projectionists run it several more times. The man said that he
thought the UFO's could be sea gulls soaring on a thermal current. He
lived in Berkeley and said that he'd seen gulls high in the air over
San Francisco Bay. We had thought of this possibility several months
before because the area around the Great Salt Lake is inhabited by
large white gulls. But the speed of the lone UFO as it left the main
group had eliminated the gulls. I pointed this out to the physicist.
His answer was that the Navy warrant officer might have thought he
had held the camera steady, but he could have "panned with the
action" unconsciously. This would throw all of our computations 'way
off. I agreed with this, but I couldn't agree that they were sea gulls.
But several months later I was in San Francisco waiting for an
airliner to Los Angeles and I watched gulls soaring in a cloudless
sky. They were "riding a thermal," and they were so high that you
couldn't see them until they banked just a certain way; then they
appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would
expect from sea gulls. There was a strong resemblance to the UFO's in
the Tremonton Movie. But I'm not sure that this is the answer.
The presentation of the two movies ended Project Blue Book's part of
the meeting. In five days we had given the panel of scientists every
pertinent detail in the history of the UFO, and it was up to them to
tell us if they were real--some type of vehicle flying through our
atmosphere. If they were real, then they would have to be spacecraft
because no one at the meeting gave a second thought to the
possibility that the UFO's might be a supersecret U.S. aircraft or a
Soviet development. The scientists knew everything that was going on
in the U.S. and they knew that no country in the world had developed
their technology far enough to build a craft that would perform as
the UFO's were reported to do. In addition, we were spending billions
of dollars on the research and development and the procurement of
airplanes that were just nudging the speed of sound. It would be
absurd to think that these billions were being spent to cover the
existence of a UFO-type weapon. And it would be equally absurd to
think that the British, French, Russians or any other country could
be far enough ahead of us to have a UFO.
The scientists spent the next two days pondering a conclusion. They
reread reports and looked at the two movies again and again, they
called other scientists to double-check certain ideas that they had,
and they discussed the problem among themselves. Then they wrote out
their conclusions and each man signed the document. The first
paragraph said:
We as a group do not believe that it is impossible for some other
celestial body to be inhabited by intelligent creatures. Nor is it
impossible that these creatures could have reached such a state of
development that they could visit the earth. However, there is
nothing in all of the so-called "flying saucer" reports that we have
read that would indicate that this is taking place.
The Tremonton Movie had been rejected as proof but the panel did
leave the door open a crack when they suggested that the Navy photo
lab redo their study. But the Navy lab never rechecked their report,
and it was over a year later before new data came to light.
After I got out of the Air Force I met Newhouse and talked to him
for two hours. I've talked to many people who have reported UFO's,
but few impressed me as much as Newhouse. I learned that when he and
his family first saw the UFO's they were close to the car, much
closer than when he took the movie. To use Newhouse's own words, "If
they had been the size of a B-29 they would have been at 10,000 feet
altitude." And the Navy man and his family had taken a good look at
the objects--they looked like "two pie pans, one inverted on the top
of the other!" He didn't just _think_ the UFO's were disk-shaped; he
_knew_ that they were; he had plainly seen them. I asked him why he
hadn't told this to the intelligence officer who interrogated him. He
said that he had. Then I remembered that I'd sent the intelligence
officer a list of questions I wanted Newhouse to answer. The question
"What did the UFO's look like?" wasn't one of them because when you
have a picture of something you don't normally ask what it looks
like. Why the intelligence officer didn't pass this information on to
us I'll never know.
The Montana Movie was rejected by the panel as positive proof
because even though the two observers said that the jets were in
another part of the sky when they saw the UFO's and our study backed
them up, there was still a chance that the two UFO's could have been
the two jets. We couldn't prove the UFO's were the jets, but neither
could we prove they weren't.
The controversial study of the UFO's' motions that Major Fournet had
presented was discarded. All of the panel agreed that if there had
been some permanent record of the motion of the UFO's, a photograph
of a UFO's flight path or a photograph of a UFO's track on a
radarscope, they could have given the study much more weight. But in
every one of the ten or twenty reports that were offered as proof
that the UFO's were intelligently controlled, the motions were only
those that the observer had seen. And the human eye and mind are not
accurate recorders. How many different stories do you get when a
group of people watch two cars collide at an intersection?
Each of the fifty of our best sightings that we gave the scientists
to study had some kind of a loophole. In many cases the loopholes
were extremely small, but scientific evaluation has no room for even
the smallest of loopholes and we had asked for a scientific evaluation.
When they had finished commenting on the reports, the scientists
pointed out the seriousness of the decision they had been asked to
make. They said that they had tried hard to be objective and not to
be picayunish, but actually all we had was circumstantial evidence.
Good circumstantial evidence, to be sure, but we had nothing
concrete, no hardware, no photos showing any detail of a UFO, no
measured speeds, altitudes, or sizes--nothing in the way of good,
hard, cold, scientific facts. To stake the future course of millions
of lives on a decision based upon circumstantial evidence would be
one of the gravest mistakes in the history of the world.
In their conclusions they touched upon the possibility that the
UFO's might be some type of new or yet undiscovered natural
phenomenon. They explained that they hadn't given this too much
credence; however, if the UFO's were a new natural phenomenon, the
reports of their general appearance should follow a definite pattern--
the UFO reports didn't.
This ended the section of the panel's report that covered their
conclusions. The next section was entitled, "Recommendations." I
fully expected that they would recommend that we as least reduce the
activities of Project Blue Book if not cancel it entirely. I didn't
like this one bit because I was firmly convinced that we didn't have
the final answer. We needed more and better proof before a final yes
or no could be given.
The panel didn't recommend that the activities of Blue Book be cut
back, and they didn't recommend that it be dropped. They recommended
that it be expanded. Too many of the reports had been made by
credible observers, the report said, people who should know what
they're looking at--people who think things out carefully. Data that
was out of the circumstantial-evidence class was badly needed. And
the panel must have been at least partially convinced that an
expanded effort would prove something interesting because the
expansion they recommended would require a considerable sum of money.
The investigative force of Project Blue Book should be quadrupled in
size, they wrote, and it should be staffed by specially trained
experts in the fields of electronics, meteorology, photography,
physics, and other fields of science pertinent to UFO investigations.
Every effort should be made to set up instruments in locations where
UFO sightings are frequent, so that data could be measured and
recorded during a sighting. In other locations around the country
military and civilian scientists should be alerted and instructed to
use every piece of available equipment that could be used to track
UFO's.
And lastly, they said that the American public should be told every
detail of every phase of the UFO investigation--the details of the
sightings, the official conclusions, and why the conclusions were
made. This would serve a double purpose; it would dispel any of the
mystery that security breeds and it would keep the Air Force on the
ball--sloppy investigations and analyses would never occur.
When the panel's conclusions were made known in the government, they
met with mixed reactions. Some people were satisfied, but others
weren't. Even the opinions of a group of the country's top scientists
couldn't overcome the controversy that had dogged the UFO for five
years. Some of those who didn't like the decision had sat in on the
UFO's trial as spectators and they felt that the "jury" was
definitely prejudiced-- afraid to stick their necks out. They could
see no reason to continue to assume that the UFO's weren't
interplanetary vehicles.