The one thing about these briefings that never failed to amaze me, although it happened time and time again, was the interest in UFO’s within scientific circles.  As soon as the word spread that Project Blue Book was giving official briefings to groups with the proper security clearances, we had no trouble in getting scientists to swap free advice for a briefing.  I might add that we briefed only groups who were engaged in government work and who had the proper security clearances solely because we could discuss any government project that might be of help to us in pinning down the UFO.  Our briefings weren’t just squeezed in either; in many instances we would arrive at a place to find that a whole day had been set aside to talk about UFO’s.  And never once did I meet anyone who laughed off the whole subject of flying saucers even though publicly these same people had jovially sloughed off the press with answers of “hallucinations,” “absurd,” or “a waste of time and money.”  They weren’t wild-eyed fans but they were certainly interested.

Colonel S. H. Kirkland and I once spent a whole day briefing and talking to the Beacon Hill Group, the code name for a collection of some of the world’s leading scientists and industrialists.  This group, formed to consider and analyze the toughest of military problems, took a very serious interest in our project and gave much good advice.  At Los Alamos and again at Sandia Base our briefings were given in auditoriums to standing room only crowds.  In addition I gave my briefings at National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics laboratories, at Air Research and Development centers, at Office of Naval Research facilities and at the Air Force University.  Then we briefed special groups of scientists.

Normally scientists are a cautious lot and stick close to proven facts, keeping their personal opinions confined to small groups of friends, but when they know that there is a sign on a door that says “Classified Briefing in Progress,” inhibitions collapse like the theories that explain all the UFO’s away.  People say just what they think.

I could jazz up this part of the UFO story as so many other historians of the UFO have and say that Dr. So-and-So believes that the reported flying saucers are from outer space or that Dr. Whositz is firmly convinced that Mars is inhabited.  I talked to plenty of Dr. So-and-So’s who believed that flying saucers were real and who were absolutely convinced that other planets or bodies in the universe were inhabited, but we were looking for proven facts and not just personal opinions.

However, some of the questions we asked the scientists had to be answered by personal opinions because the exact answers didn’t exist.  When such questions came up, about all we could do was to try to get the largest and most representative cross section of personal opinions upon which to base our decisions.  In this category of questions probably the most frequently discussed was the possibility that other celestial bodies in the universe were populated with intelligent beings.  The exact answer to this is that no one knows.  But the consensus was that it wouldn’t be at all surprising.