In a few days I again left ATIC, this time for Air Defense Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  I wanted to find out how willing ADC was to help us and what they could do.  When I arrived I got a thorough briefing on the operations of ADC and the promise that they would do anything they could to help solve the UFO riddle.

All of this co-operation was something that I hadn’t expected.  I’d been warned by the people who had worked on Project Sign and the old Project Grudge that everybody hated the word UFO—­I’d have to fight for everything I asked for.  But once again they were wrong.  The scientists who visited ATIC, General Samford, Project Bear, and now Air Defense Command couldn’t have been more co-operative.  I was becoming aware that there was much wider concern about UFO reports than I’d ever realized before.

While I traveled around the United States getting the project set up, UFO reports continued to come in and all of them were good.  One series of reports was especially good, and they came from a group of people who had had a great deal of experience watching things in the sky—­the people who launch the big skyhook balloons for General Mills, Inc.  The reports of what the General Mills people had seen while they were tracking their balloons covered a period of over a year.  They had just sent them in because they had heard that Project Grudge was being reorganized and was taking a different view on UFO reports.  They, like so many other reliable observers, had been disgusted with the previous Air Force attitude toward UFO reports, and they had refused to send in any reports.  I decided that these people might be a good source of information, and I wanted to get further details on their reports, so I got orders to go to Minneapolis.  A scientist from Project Bear went with me.  We arrived on January 14, 1952, in the middle of a cold wave and a blizzard.

The Aeronautical Division of General Mills, Inc., of Wheaties and Betty Crocker fame, had launched and tracked every skyhook balloon that had been launched prior to mid-1952.  They knew what their balloons looked like under all lighting conditions and they also knew meteorology, aerodynamics, astronomy, and they knew UFO’s.  I talked to these people for the better part of a full day, and every time I tried to infer that there might be some natural explanation for the UFO’s I just about found myself in a fresh snowdrift.

What made these people so sure that UFO’s existed?  In the first place, they had seen many of them.  One man told me that one tracking crew had seen so many that the sight of a UFO no longer even especially interested them.  And the things that they saw couldn’t be explained.