The consideration that the colonel’s plan received was an indication of how some of the military people felt about the importance of finding out exactly what the UFO’s really were.  And in the discussions the words “interplanetary craft” came up more than once.

Requests for briefings came even from the highest figure in the Air Force, Thomas K. Finletter, then the Secretary for Air.  On May 8, 1952, Lieutenant Colonel R. J. Taylor of Colonel Dunn’s staff and I presented an hour-long briefing to Secretary Finletter and his staff.  He listened intently and asked several questions about specific sightings when the briefing was finished.  If he was at all worried about the UFO’s he certainly didn’t show it.  His only comment was, “You’re doing a fine job, Captain.  It must be interesting.  Thank you.”

Then he made the following statement for the press: 

“No concrete evidence has yet reached us either to prove or disprove the existence of the so-called flying saucers.  There remain, however, a number of sightings that the Air Force investigators have been unable to explain.  As long as this is true, the Air Force will continue to study flying saucer reports.”

In May 1952, Project Blue Book received seventy-nine UFO reports compared to ninety-nine in April.  It looked as if we’d passed the peak and were now on the downhill side.  The 178 reports of the past two months, not counting the thousand or so letters that we’d received directly from the public, had piled up a sizable backlog since we’d had time to investigate and analyze only the better reports.  During June we planned to clear out the backlog, and then we could relax.

But never underestimate the power of a UFO.  In June the big flap hit —­they began to deliver clippings in big cardboard cartons.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Big Flap

In early June 1952, Project Blue Book was operating according to the operational plan that had been set up in January 1952.  It had taken six months to put the plan into effect, and to a person who has never been indoctrinated into the ways of the military, this may seem like a long time.  But consult your nearest government worker and you’ll find that it was about par for the red tape course.

We had learned early in the project that about 60 per cent of the reported UFO’s were actually balloons, airplanes, or astronomical bodies viewed under unusual conditions, so our operational plan was set up to quickly weed out this type of report.  This would give us more time to concentrate on the unknown cases.