I asked him about the weather.  The target didn’t look like a weather target was the answer, but just to be sure, the test crew had checked.  One of his men was an electronics-weather specialist whom he had hired because of his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of radar under certain weather conditions.  This man had looked into the weather angle.  He had gotten the latest weather data and checked it, but there wasn’t the slightest indication of an inversion or any other weather that would cause a false target.

Just before I hung up I asked the man what he thought he and his crew had picked up, and once again I got the same old answer:  “Yesterday at this time any of us would have argued for hours that flying saucers were a bunch of nonsense but now, regardless of what you’ll say about what we saw, it was something damned real.”

I thanked the man for calling and hung up.  We couldn’t make any more of an analysis of this report than had already been made, it was another unknown.

I went over to the MO file and pulled out the stack of cards behind the tab “High-Speed Climb.”  There must have been at least a hundred cards, each one representing a UFO report in which the reported object made a high-speed climb.  But this was the first time radar had tracked a UFO during a climb.

During the early part of June, Project Blue Book took another jump up on the organizational chart.  A year before the UFO project had consisted of one officer.  It had risen from the one-man operation to a project within a group, then to a group, and now it was a section.  Neither Project Sign nor the old Project Grudge had been higher than the project-within-a-group level.  The chief of a group normally calls for a lieutenant colonel, and since I was just a captain this caused some consternation in the ranks.  There was some talk about putting Lieutenant Colonel Ray Taylor of Colonel Dunn’s staff in charge.  Colonel Taylor was very much interested in UFO’s; he had handled some of the press contacts prior to turning this function over to the Pentagon and had gone along with me on briefings, so he knew something about the project.  But in the end Colonel Donald Bower, who was my division chief, decided rank be damned, and I stayed on as chief of Project Blue Book.

The location within the organizational chart is always indicative of the importance placed on a project.  In June 1952 the Air Force was taking the UFO problem seriously.  One of the reasons was that there were a lot of good UFO reports coming in from Korea.  Fighter pilots reported seeing silver-colored spheres or disks on several occasions, and radar in Japan, Okinawa, and in Korea had tracked unidentified targets.

In June our situation map, on which we kept a plot of all of our sightings, began to show an ever so slight trend toward reports beginning to bunch up on the east coast.  We discussed this build-up, but we couldn’t seem to find any explainable reason for it so we decided that we’d better pay special attention to reports coming from the eastern states.