Part 21 (1/2)

Then in early 1952 there was another good report from this area It was an unknown

The incident started when the pilot of an Air Force C-54 transport radioed Goose AFB and said that at 10:42PM a large fireball had buzzed his airplane It had come in from behind the C-54, and nobody had seen it until it was just off the left wing The fireball was so big that the pilot said it looked as if it was only a few hundred feet away The C-54 was 200into Goose AFB from Westover AFB, Massachusetts, when the incident occurred The base officer-of-the-day, as also a pilot, happened to be in the flight operations office at Goose when the e came in and he overheard the report He stepped outside, walked over to his coe, so the driver got out and both of them looked toward the south They searched the horizon for a few seconds; then suddenly they saw a light closing in from the southwest Within a second, it was near the airfield It had increased in size till it was as big as a ”golf ball at ar ball of fire It was so low that both the OD and his driver dove under the co to hit the airfield When they turned and looked up they saw the fireball ree turn over the airfield and disappear into the northwest The time was 10:47PM

The control tower operators saw the fireball too, but didn't agree with the OD and his driver on hoas They did think that it had ree turn and they didn't think that it was a meteor

In the years they'd been in towers they'd seen hundreds oflike this, they reported

And reports continued to pour into Project Blue Book It was now not uncoet ten or eleven wires in one day If the letters reporting UFO sightings were counted, the total would rise to twenty or thirty a day The majority of the reports that caood They were reports made by reliable people and they were full of details Some were reports of balloons, airplanes, etc, but the percentage of unknowns hovered right around 22 per cent

To describe and analyze each report, or even the unknoould require a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, so I a only the best and most representative cases

One day infor Washi+ngton and he wantedBy this tis as a s to General Garland and a general from the Research and Development Board, who passed the inforence But this time General Samford, some of the members of his staff, two Navy captains froence, and so

When I arrived in Washi+ngton, Major Fournet told , was to try to find out if there was any significance to the al increase in UFO reports over the past feeeks By the ti roo of the Pentagon, it was about 9:15AM I startedas soon as everyone was seated

I reviewed the last month's UFO activities; then I briefly went over the”Unknown” UFO reports and pointed out how they were increasing in nu all previous records I also pointed out that even though the UFO subject was getting a lot of publicity, it wasn't the scare-type publicity that had accompanied the earlier flaps--in fact, much of the present publicity was anti- saucer

Then I went on to say that even though the reports ere getting were detailed and contained a great deal of good data, we still had no proof the UFO's were anything real We could, I said, prove that all UFO reports were merely the misinterpretation of known objects _if_ we made a few assumptions

At this point one of the colonels on General Samford's staff stopped me ”Isn't it true,” he asked, ”that if you ative assumptions you can just as easily prove that the UFO's are interplanetary spaceshi+ps? Why, when you have to et an answer to a report, do you always pick the assumption that proves the UFO's don't exist?”

You could almost hear the colonel add, ”OK, so now I've said it”

For several ative attitude and the fact that the UFO's could be interplanetary spaceshi+ps had been growing in the Pentagon, but these ideas were usually discussed only in the privacy of offices with doors that would close tight

No one said anything, so the colonel who had broken the ice plunged in He used the sighting from Goose AFB, where the fireball had buzzed the C-54 and sent the OD and his driver belly-whopping under the command car as an exah we had labeled the report ”Unknown” it wasn't accepted as proof He wanted to knohy

I said that our philosophy was that the fireball could have been two meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across the airfield at Goose AFB Granted a meteor doesn't coree turn, but these could have been optical illusions of some kind The crew of the C-54, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators didn't recognize the UFO's asstars” that are most commonly seen

But the colonel had so two extre the same direction, only five minutes apart?”

I didn't know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather small, I had to admit

Then he asked, ”What kind of an optical illusion would cause a ree turn?”

I had asked our Project Bear astronomer this same question, and he couldn't answer it either So the only answer I could give the colonel was, ”I don't know” I felt as if I were on a witness stand being cross-examined, and that is exactly where I was, because the colonel cut loose

”Why not assume a point that is more easily proved?” he asked ”Why not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators did knohat they were talking about? Maybe they had seen spectacularthe hundreds of hours that they had flown at night and the hts that they had been on duty in the tower

Maybe the ball of fire had ently controlled craft that had streaked northeast across the Gulf of St Lawrence and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an hour

”Why not just simply believe that most people knohat they saw?”

the colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice

This last comment started a lively discussion, and I was able to retreat The colonel had been right in a sense--ere being conservative, but ation you always assuet a positive answer I don't think that we had a positive answer--yet