I thought he meant that I was trying to spice things up a little, so I said that since he had copies of most of our reports and had read them, he should know that I was giving them the facts straight across the board.

Then one of the other officers at the table cut in, “That’s just the point, we do have the reports and we have read them.  None of us can understand why Intelligence is so hesitant to accept the fact that something we just don’t know about is flying around in our skies—­ unless you are trying to cover up something big.”

Everyone at the table put in his ideas.  One radar man said that he’d looked over several dozen radar reports and that his conclusion was that the UFO’s couldn’t be anything but interplanetary spaceships.  He started to give his reasons when another radar man leaped into the conversation.

This man said that he’d read every radar report, too, and that there wasn’t one that couldn’t be explained as a weather phenomenon—­even the radar-visual sightings.  In fact, he wasn’t even convinced that we had ever gotten such a thing as radar-visual sighting.  He wanted to see proof that an object that was seen visually was the same object that the radar had picked up.  Did we have it?

I got back into the discussion at this point with the answer.  No, we didn’t have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of proof needed.  But we did have reports where the radar and visual bearings of the UFO coincided almost exactly.  Then we had a few reports where airplanes had followed the UFO’s and the maneuvers of the UFO that the pilot reported were the same as the maneuvers of the UFO that was being tracked by radar.

A lieutenant colonel who had been sitting quietly by interjected a well-chosen comment.  “It seems the difficulty that Project Blue Book faces is what to accept and what not to accept as proof.”

The colonel had hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head.

Then he went on, “Everyone has a different idea of what proof really is.  Some people think we should accept a new model of an airplane after only five or ten hours of flight testing.  This is enough proof for them that the airplane will fly.  But others wouldn’t be happy unless it was flight-tested for five or ten years.  These people have set an unreasonably high value on the word ‘proof.’  The answer is somewhere in between these two extremes.”

But where is this point when it comes to UFO’s?

There was about a thirty-second pause for thought after the colonel’s little speech.  Then someone asked, “What about these recent sightings at Mainbrace?”

In late September 1952 the NATO naval forces had held maneuvers off the coast of Europe; they were called Operation Mainbrace.  Before they had started someone in the Pentagon had half seriously mentioned that Naval Intelligence should keep an eye open for UFO’s, but no one really expected the UFO’s to show up.  Nevertheless, once again the UFO’s were their old unpredictable selves—­they were there.