But the movies that were sent in to us were different.  In the first place, it takes an expert with elaborate equipment to fake a movie.  We had or knew about four strips of movie film that fell into the “Unknown” category.  Two were the cinetheodolite movies that had been taken at White Sands Proving Ground in April and May of 1950, one was the Montana Movie and the last was the Tremonton Movie.  These latter two had been subjected to thousands of hours of analysis, and since we planned to give the panel of scientists more thorough reports on them on Friday, I skipped over their details and went to the next point I wanted to cover—­theories.

Periodically throughout the history of the UFO people have come up with widely publicized theories to explain all UFO reports.  The one that received the most publicity was the one offered by Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard University.  Dr. Menzel, writing in Time, Look, and later in his Flying Saucers, claimed that all UFO reports could be explained as various types of light phenomena.  We studied this theory thoroughly because it did seem to have merit.  Project Bear’s physicists studied it.  ATIC’s scientific consultants studied it and discussed it with several leading European physicists whose specialty was atmospheric physics.  In general the comments that Project Blue Book received were, “He’s given the subject some thought but his explanations are not the panacea.”

And there were other widely publicized theories.  One man said that they were all skyhook balloons, but we knew the flight path of every skyhook balloon and they were seldom reported as UFO’s.  Their little brothers, the weather balloons, caused us a great deal more trouble.

The Army Engineers took a crack at solving the UFO problem by making an announcement that a scientist in one of their laboratories had duplicated a flying saucer in his laboratory.  Major Dewey Fournet checked into this one.  It had all started out as a joke, but it was picked up as fact and the scientist was stuck with it.  He gained some publicity but lost prestige because other scientists wondered just how competent the man really was to try to pass off such an answer.

All in all, the unsolicited assistance of theorists didn’t help us a bit, I told the panel members.  Some of them were evidently familiar with the theories because they nodded their heads in agreement.

The next topic I covered in my briefing was a question that came up quite frequently in discussions of the UFO:  Did UFO reports actually start in 1947?  We had spent a great deal of time trying to resolve this question.  Old newspaper files, journals, and books that we found in the Library of Congress contained many reports of odd things being seen in the sky as far back as the Biblical times.  The old Negro spiritual says, “Ezekiel saw a wheel ’way up in the middle of the air.”  We couldn’t substantiate Ezekiel’s sighting because many of the very old reports of odd things observed in the sky could be explained as natural phenomena that weren’t fully understood in those days.