By the fall of 1952 we had a considerable number of well-documented reports in which the UFO’s made a series of maneuvers.  If we could prove that these maneuvers were not random, but ordered, it would be proof that the UFO’s were things that were intelligently controlled.

During our discussion Major Fournet brought up two reports in which the UFO seemed to know what it was doing and wasn’t just aimlessly darting around.  One of these was the recent sighting from Haneda AFB, Japan, and the other was the incident that happened on the night of July 29, when an F-94 attempted to intercept a UFO over eastern Michigan.  In both cases radar had established the track of the UFO.

In the Haneda Incident, according to the sketch of the UFO’s track, each turn the UFO made was constant and the straight “legs” between the turns were about the same length.  The sketch of the UFO’s flight path as it moved back and forth over Tokyo Bay reminded me very much of the “crisscross” search patterns we used to fly during World War II when we were searching for the crew of a ditched airplane.  The only time the UFO seriously deviated from this pattern was when the F-94 got on its tail.

The Michigan sighting was even better, however.  In this case there was a definite reason for every move that the UFO made.  It made a 180- degree turn because the F-94 was closing on it head on.  It alternately increased and decreased its speed, but every time it did this it was because the F-94 was closing in and it evidently put on speed to pull out ahead far enough to get out of range of the F-94’s radar.  To say that this motion was random and that it was just a coincidence that the UFO made the 180-degree turn when the F-94 closed in head on and that it was just a coincidence that the UFO speeded up every time the F-94 began to get within radar range is pushing the chance of coincidence pretty hard.

The idea of the motion analysis study sounded interesting to me, but we were so busy on Project Blue Book we didn’t have time to do it.  So Major Fournet offered to look into it further and I promised him all the help we could give him.

In the meantime my people in Project Blue Book were contacting various scientists in the U.S., and indirectly in Europe, telling them about our data, and collecting opinions.  We did this in two ways.  In the United States we briefed various scientific meetings and groups.  To get the word to the other countries, we enlisted the gratis aid of scientists who were planning to attend conferences or meetings in Europe.  We would brief these European-bound scientists on all of the aspects of the UFO problem so they could informally discuss the problem with their European colleagues.