To describe and analyze each report, or even the unknowns, would require a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, so I am covering only the best and most representative cases.

One day in mid-June, Colonel Dunn called me.  He was leaving for Washington and he wanted me to come in the next day to give a briefing at a meeting.  By this time I was taking these briefings as a matter of course.  We usually gave the briefings to General Garland and a general from the Research and Development Board, who passed the information on to General Samford, the Director of Intelligence.  But this time General Samford, some of the members of his staff, two Navy captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and some people I can’t name were at the briefing.

When I arrived in Washington, Major Fournet told me that the purpose of the meetings, and my briefing, was to try to find out if there was any significance to the almost alarming increase in UFO reports over the past few weeks.  By the time that everyone had finished signing into the briefing room in the restricted area of the fourth-floor “B” ring of the Pentagon, it was about 9:15A.M.  I started my briefing as soon as everyone was seated.

I reviewed the last month’s UFO activities; then I briefly went over the more outstanding “Unknown” UFO reports and pointed out how they were increasing in number—­breaking all previous records.  I also pointed out that even though the UFO subject was getting a lot of publicity, it wasn’t the scare-type publicity that had accompanied the earlier flaps—­in fact, much of the present publicity was anti-saucer.

Then I went on to say that even though the reports we were getting were detailed and contained a great deal of good data, we still had no proof the UFO’s were anything real.  We could, I said, prove that all UFO reports were merely the misinterpretation of known objects if we made a few assumptions.

At this point one of the colonels on General Samford’s staff stopped me.  “Isn’t it true,” he asked, “that if you make a few positive assumptions instead of negative assumptions you can just as easily prove that the UFO’s are interplanetary spaceships?  Why, when you have to make an assumption to get an answer to a report, do you always pick the assumption that proves the UFO’s don’t exist?”

You could almost hear the colonel add, “O.K., so now I’ve said it.”

For several months the belief that Project Blue Book was taking a negative attitude and the fact that the UFO’s could be interplanetary spaceships had been growing in the Pentagon, but these ideas were usually discussed only in the privacy of offices with doors that would close tight.

No one said anything, so the colonel who had broken the ice plunged in.  He used the sighting from Goose AFB, where the fireball had buzzed the C-54 and sent the OD and his driver belly-whopping under the command car as an example.  The colonel pointed out that even though we had labeled the report “Unknown” it wasn’t accepted as proof.  He wanted to know why.