This briefing started a long period of close co-operation between Project Grudge and ADC, and it was a pleasure to work with these people.  In all of my travels around the government, visiting and conferring with dozens of agencies, I never had the pleasure of working with or seeing a more smoothly operating and efficient organization than the Air Defense Command.  General Chidlaw and General Burgess, along with the rest of the staff at ADC, were truly great officers.  None of them were believers in flying saucers, but they recognized the fact that UFO reports were a problem that must be considered.  With technological progress what it is today, you can’t afford to have anything in the air that you can’t identify, be it balloons, meteors, planets or flying saucers.

The plan that ADC agreed to was very simple.  They agreed to issue a directive to all of their units explaining the UFO situation and telling specifically what to do in case one was detected.  All radar units equipped with radarscope cameras would be required to take scope photos of targets that fell into the UFO category—­targets that were not airplanes or known weather phenomena.  These photos, along with a completed technical questionnaire that would be made up at ATIC by Captain Roy James, would be forwarded to Project Grudge.

The Air Defense Command UFO directive would also clarify the scrambling of fighters to intercept a UFO.  Since it is the policy of the Air Defense Command to establish the identity of any unidentified target, there were no special orders issued for scrambling fighters to try to identify reported UFO’s.  A UFO was something unknown and automatically called for a scramble.  However, there had been some hesitancy on the part of controllers to send airplanes up whenever radar picked up a target that obviously was not an airplane.  The directive merely pointed out to the controllers that it was within the scope of existing regulations to scramble on radar targets that were plotted as traveling too fast or too slow to be conventional airplanes.  The decision to scramble fighters was still up to the individual controller, however, and scrambling on UFO’s would be a second or third priority.

The Air Defense Command UFO directive did not mention shooting at a UFO.  This question came up during our planning meeting at Colorado Springs, but, like the authority to scramble, the authority to shoot at anything in the air had been established long ago.  Every ADC pilot knows the rules for engagement, the rules that tell him when he can shoot the loaded guns that he always carries.  If anything in the air over the United States commits any act that is covered by the rules for engagement, the pilot has the authority to open fire.

The third thing that ADC would do would be to integrate the Ground Observer Corps into the UFO reporting net.  As a second priority, the GOC would report UFO’s—­first priority would still be reporting aircraft.