Thomas—­you goofed on that prediction.

I had one more important point to cover before I finished my briefing and opened the meeting to a general question-and-answer session.

During the past year and a half we had had several astronomers visit Project Blue Book, and they were not at all hesitant to give us their opinions but they didn’t care to say much about what their colleagues were thinking, although they did indicate that they were thinking.  We decided that the opinions and comments of astronomers would be of value, so late in 1952 we took a poll.  We asked an astronomer, whom we knew to be unbiased about the UFO problem and who knew every outstanding astronomer in the United States, to take a trip and talk to his friends.  We asked him not to make a point of asking about the UFO but just to work the subject into a friendly conversation.  This way we hoped to get a completely frank opinion.  To protect his fellow astronomers, our astronomer gave them all code names and he kept the key to the code.

The report we received expressed the detailed opinions of forty-five recognized authorities.  Their opinions varied from that of Dr. C, who regarded the UFO project as a “silly waste of money to investigate an even sillier subject,” to Dr. L, who has spent a great deal of his own valuable time personally investigating UFO reports because he believes that they are something “real.”  Of the forty-five astronomers who were interviewed, 36 per cent were not at all interested in the UFO reports, 41 per cent were interested to the point of offering their services if they were ever needed, and 23 per cent thought that the UFO’s were a much more serious problem than most people recognized.

None of the astronomers, even during a friendly discussion, admitted that he thought the UFO’s could be interplanetary vehicles.  All of those who were interested would only go so far as to say, “We don’t know what they are, but they’re something real.”

During the past few years I have heard it said that if the UFO’s were really “solid objects” our astronomers would have seen them.  Our study shed some light on this point—­astronomers have seen UFO’s.  None of them has ever seen or photographed anything resembling a UFO through his telescope, but 11 per cent of the forty-five men had seen something that they couldn’t explain.  Although, technically speaking, these sightings were no better than hundreds of others in our files as far as details were concerned, they were good because of the caliber of the observer.  Astronomers know what is in the sky.

It is interesting to note that out of the representative cross section of astronomers, five of them, or 11 per cent, had sighted UFO’s.  For a given group of people this is well above average.  To check this point, the astronomer who was making our study picked ninety people at random—­people he met while traveling—­and got them into a conversation about flying saucers.  These people