On April 27, 1950, a guided missile had been fired, and as it roared up into the stratosphere and fell back to earth, the camera crews had recorded its flight.  All the crews had started to unload their cameras when one of them spotted an object streaking across the sky.  By April 1950 every person at White Sands was UFO-conscious, so one member of the camera crew grabbed a telephone headset, alerted the other crews, and told them to get pictures.  Unfortunately only one camera had film in it, the rest had already been unloaded, and before they could reload, the UFO was gone.  The photos from the one station showed only a smudgy dark object.  About all the film proved was that something was in the air and whatever it was, it was moving.

Alerted by this first chance to get a UFO to “run a measured course,” the camera crews agreed to keep a sharper lookout.  They also got the official O.K. to “shoot” a UFO if one appeared.

Almost exactly a month later another UFO did appear, or at least at the time the camera crews thought that it was a UFO.  This time the crews were ready—­when the call went out over the telephone net that a UFO had been spotted, all of the crews scanned the sky.  Two of the crews saw it and shot several feet of film as the shiny, bright object streaked across the sky.

As soon as the missile tests were completed, the camera crews rushed their film to the processing lab and then took it to the Data Reduction Group.  But once again the UFO had eluded man because there were apparently two or more UFO’s in the sky and each camera station had photographed a separate one.  The data were no good for triangulation.

The records at ATIC didn’t contain the analysis of these films but they did mention the Data Reduction Group at White Sands.  So when I later took over the UFO investigation I made several calls in an effort to run down the actual film and the analysis.  The files at White Sands, like all files, evidently weren’t very good, because the original reports were gone.  I did contact a major who was very co-operative and offered to try to find the people who had worked on the analysis of the film.  His report, after talking to two men who had done the analysis, was what I’d expected—­nothing concrete except that the UFO’s were unknowns.  He did say that by putting a correction factor in the data gathered by the two cameras they were able to arrive at a rough estimate of speed, altitude, and size.  The UFO was “higher than 40,000 feet, traveling over 2,000 miles per hour, and it was over 300 feet in diameter.”  He cautioned me, however, that these figures were only estimates, based on the possibly erroneous correction factor; therefore they weren’t proof of anything—­except that something was in the air.

The people at White Sands continued to be on the alert for UFO’s while the camera stations were in operation because they realized that if the flight path of a UFO could be accurately plotted and timed it could be positively identified.  But no more UFO’s showed up.