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 s.p.a.cecraft.

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 s.p.a.cecraft.

Because of military regulations, the names of the panel members, like the names of so many other people a.s.sociated 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members is now the chief civilian adviser to one of our top military commanders, and another was an astronomer whose unpublished fight to get the UFO recognized is respected throughout scientific circles.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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.n.a.lyzed 1,593 UFO reports. About 4,400 had actually been received, but all except 1,593 had been immediately rejected for a.n.a.lysis. 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 compa.s.s.

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 alt.i.tude 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 s.p.a.cemen. 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 pa.s.s off such an answer.

All in all, the unsolicited a.s.sistance 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 doc.u.mented 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 Francis...o...b..y 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."