After the meeting I went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to some people about how to get better UFO data.  We brought back the idea of using an extremely long focal-length camera equipped with a diffraction grating.

The cameras would be placed at various locations throughout the United States where UFO’s were most frequently seen.  We hoped that photos of the UFO’s taken through the diffraction gratings would give us some proof one way or the other.

The diffraction gratings we planned to use over the lenses of the cameras were the same thing as prisms; they would split up the light from the UFO into its component parts so that we could study it and determine whether it was a meteor, an airplane, or balloon reflecting sunlight, etc.  Or we might be able to prove that the photographed UFO was a craft completely foreign to our knowledge.

A red-hot, A-l priority was placed on the camera project, and a section at ATIC that developed special equipment took over the job of obtaining the cameras, or, if necessary, having them designed and built.

But the UFO’s weren’t waiting around till they could be photographed.  Every day the tempo and confusion were increasing a little more.

By the end of June it was very noticeable that most of the better reports were coming from the eastern United States.  In Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland jet fighters had been scrambled almost nightly for a week.  On three occasions radar-equipped F-94’s had locked on aerial targets only to have the lock-on broken by the apparent violent maneuvers of the target.

By the end of June there was also a lull in the newspaper publicity about the UFO’s.  The forthcoming political conventions had wiped out any mention of flying saucers.  But on July 1 there was a sudden outbreak of good reports.  The first one came from Boston; then they worked down the coast.

About seven twenty-five on the morning of July 1 two F-94’s were scrambled to intercept a UFO that a Ground Observer Corps spotter reported was traveling southwest across Boston.  Radar couldn’t pick it up so the two airplanes were just vectored into the general area.  The F-94’s searched the area but couldn’t see anything.  We got the report at ATIC and would have tossed it out if it hadn’t been for other reports from the Boston area at that same time.

One of these reports came from a man and his wife at Lynn, Massachusetts, nine miles northeast of Boston.  At seven-thirty they had noticed the two vapor trails from the climbing jet interceptors.  They looked around the sky to find out if they could see what the jets were after and off to the west they saw a bright silver “cigar-shaped object about six times as long as it was wide” traveling southwest across Boston.  It appeared to be traveling just a little faster than the two jets.  As they watched they saw that an identical UFO was following the first one some distance back.  The UFO’s weren’t leaving vapor trails but, as the man mentioned in his report, this didn’t mean anything because you can get above the vapor trail level.  And the two UFO’s appeared to be at a very high altitude.  The two observers watched as the two F-94’s searched back and forth far below the UFO’s.