Besides being an “Unknown,” this report was exceptionally interesting to us because the sighting was made from the center of downtown Washington, D.C.  The professor reported that he had noticed the UFO when he saw people all along the street looking up in the air and pointing.  He estimated that at least 500 people were looking at it, yet his was the only report we received.  This seemed to substantiate our theory that people are very hesitant to report UFO’s to the Air Force.  But they evidently do tell the newspapers because later on we picked up a short account of the sighting in the Washington papers.  It merely said that hundreds of calls had been received from people reporting a UFO.

When reports were pouring in at the rate of twenty or thirty a day, we were glad that people were hesitant to report UFO’s, but when we were trying to find the answer to a really knotty sighting we always wished that more people had reported it.  The old adage of having your cake and eating it, too, held even for the UFO.

Technically no one in Washington, besides, of course, Major General Samford and his superiors, had anything to do with making policy decisions about the operation of Project Blue Book or the handling of the UFO situation in general.  Nevertheless, everyone was trying to get into the act.  The split in opinions on what to do about the rising tide of UFO reports, the split that first came out in the open at General Samford’s briefing, was widening every day.  One group was getting dead-serious about the situation.  They thought we now had plenty of evidence to back up an official statement that the UFO’s were something real and, to be specific, not something from this earth.  This group wanted Project Blue Book to quit spending time investigating reports from the standpoint of trying to determine if the observer of a UFO had actually seen something foreign to our knowledge and start assuming that he or she had.  They wanted me to aim my investigation at trying to find out more about the UFO.  Along with this switch in operating policy, they wanted to clamp down on the release of information.  They thought that the security classification of the project should go up to Top Secret until we had all of the answers, then the information should be released to the public.  The investigation of UFO’s along these lines should be a maximum effort, they thought, and their plans called for lining up many top scientists to devote their full time to the project.  Someone once said that enthusiasm is infectious, and he was right.  The enthusiasm of this group took a firm hold in the Pentagon, at Air Defense Command Headquarters, on the Research and Development Board, and many other agencies throughout the government.  But General Samford was still giving the orders, and he said to continue to operate just as we had—­keeping an open mind to any ideas.

After the minor flurry of reports on July 1 we had a short breathing spell and found time to clean up a sizable backlog of reports.  People were still seeing UFO’s but the frequency of the sighting curve was dropping steadily.  During the first few days of July we were getting only two or three good reports a day.