But we had many reports in which people reported UFO’s and obviously hadn’t panicked.  Reports from pilots who had seen mysterious lights at night and, thinking that they might be a cockpit reflection, had turned off all their cockpit lights.  Or the pilots who turned and rolled their airplanes to see if they could change the angle of reflection and get rid of the UFO.  Or those pilots who climbed and dove thousands of feet and then leveled out to see if the UFO would change its relative position to the airplane.  Or the amateur astronomer who made an excellent sighting and before he reluctantly reported it as a UFO had talked to a half dozen professional astronomers and physicists in hopes of finding an explanation.  All of these people were thinking clearly, questioning themselves as to what the sightings could be; then trying to answer their questions.  These people weren’t panicked.

The question-and-answer period went on for a full day as the scientists dug into the details of the general facts I had given them in my briefing.

The following day and a half was devoted to reviewing and discussing fifty of our best sighting reports that we had classed as “Unknowns.”

The next item on the agenda, when the panel had finished absorbing all of the details of the fifty selected top reports, was a review of a very hot and very highly controversial study.  It was based on the idea that Major Dewey Fournet and I had talked about several months before—­an analysis of the motions of the reported UFO’s in an attempt to determine whether they were intelligently controlled.  The study was hot because it wasn’t official and the reason it wasn’t official was because it was so hot.  It concluded that the UFO’s were interplanetary spaceships.  The report had circulated around high command levels of intelligence and it had been read with a good deal of interest.  But even though some officers at command levels just a notch below General Samford bought it, the space behind the words “Approved by” was blank—­no one would stick his neck out and officially send it to the top.

Dewey Fournet, who had completed his tour of active duty in the Air Force and was now a civilian, was called from Houston, Texas, to tell the scientists about the study since he had worked very closely with the group that had prepared it.

The study covered several hundred of our most detailed UFO reports.  By a very critical process of elimination, based on the motion of the reported UFO’s, Fournet told the panel how he and any previous analysis by Project Blue Book had been disregarded and how those reports that could have been caused by any one of the many dozen known objects—­balloons, airplanes, astronomical bodies, etc., were sifted out.  This sifting took quite a toll, and the study ended up with only ten or twenty reports that fell into the “Unknown” category.  Since such critical methods of evaluation had been used, these few reports proved beyond a doubt that the UFO’s were intelligently controlled by persons with brains equal to or far surpassing ours.