Part 21 (2/2)
The colonel's coe of ideas, pros and cons, and insinuations that so the truth followed
The outco was a directive to take further steps to obtain positive identification of the UFO's Our original idea of atte so we could use triangulation toout We had given the idea enough publicity, but reports where triangulation could be used were few and far between Mr or Mrs Average Citizen just doesn't look up at the sky unless he or she sees a flash of light or hears a sound Then even if he or she does look up and sees a UFO, it is very seldoets to Project Blue Book I think that it would be safe to say that Blue Book only heard about 10 per cent of the UFO's that were seen in the United States
After theI went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to soht back the idea of using an extrerating
The cahout the United States where UFO's were most frequently seen We hoped that photos of the UFO's taken through the diffraction gratings would give us sos we planned to use over the lenses of the ca as prisht from the UFO into its component parts so that we could study it and determine whether it was a ht, etc Or we raphed UFO was a craft coe
A red-hot, A-l priority was placed on the camera project, and a section at ATIC that developed special equip the caned and built
But the UFO's weren't waiting around till they could be photographed Every day the te a little more
By the end of June it was very noticeable thatfrom the eastern United States In Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland jet fighters had been scrahtly for a week On three occasions radar-equipped F-94's had locked on aerial targets only to have the lock-on broken by the apparent violent et
By the end of June there was also a lull in the newspaper publicity about the UFO's The forthco saucers But on July 1 there was a sudden outbreak of good reports The first one came from Boston; then they worked down the coast
About seven twenty-five on theof July 1 two F-94's were scrambled to intercept a UFO that a Ground Observer Corps spotter reported was traveling southwest across Boston Radar couldn't pick it up so the two airplanes were just vectored into the general area
The F-94's searched the area but couldn't see anything We got the report at ATIC and would have tossed it out if it hadn't been for other reports from the Boston area at that same time
One of these reports came from a man and his wife at Lynn, Massachusetts, nine miles northeast of Boston At seven-thirty they had noticed the two vapor trails fro jet interceptors
They looked around the sky to find out if they could see what the jets were after and off to the west they saw a bright silver ”cigar- shaped object about six ti southwest across Boston It appeared to be traveling just a little faster than the two jets As they watched they saw that an identical UFO was following the first one so vapor trails but, as thebecause you can get above the vapor trail level
And the two UFO's appeared to be at a very high altitude The two observers watched as the two F-94's searched back and forth far below the UFO's
Then there was another report, alsohis hoht west of Lynn, when he saw the two jets In his report he said that he, too, had looked around the sky to see if he could see what they were trying to intercept when off to the east he saw a ”silvery cigar-shaped object” traveling south His description of what he observed was almost identical to what the couple in Lynn reported except that he saw only one UFO
When we received the report, I wanted to send so more data from the civilian couple and the Air Force captain; this seeulation But by July 1 ere completely snowed under with reports, and there just wasn't anybody to send Then, to complicate matters, other reports cahting in the Boston area Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, popped back into UFO history At nine-thirty in thetwelve student radar operators and three instructors were tracking nine jets on an SCR 584 radar set when two UFO targets appeared on the scope The two targets came in from the northeast at a slow speed,tracked, hovered near Fort Monmouth at 50,000 feet for about five minutes, and then took off in a ”terrific burst of speed” to the southwest
When the targets first appeared, some of the class went outside with an instructor, and after searching the sky for about a minute, they sao shi+ny objects in the saets to be They watched the two UFO's for severaloff to the southwest at exactly the saets moved off the scope in that direction
We had plotted these reports, the ones from Boston and the one froination or wild assus” had co Island, hovered for a few minutes over the Army's secret laboratories at Fort Monton In a e half expected to get a report froton Our expectations were rewarded because in a few hours a report arrived froton University reported a ”dull, gray, smoky-colored” object which hovered north northwest of Washi+ngton for about eight minutes Every once in a while, the professor reported, it would ht or left, but it always returned to its original position While he atching the UFO he took a 25-cent piece out of his pocket and held it at arth so that he could compare its size to that of the UFO The UFO was about half the diameter of the quarter When he first saw the UFO, it was about 30 to 40 degrees above the horizon, but during the eight ht it steadily dropped lower and lower until buildings in don Washi+ngton blocked off the view
Besides being an ”Unknown,” this report was exceptionally interesting to us because the sighting was ton, DC The professor reported that he had noticed the UFO when he saw people all along the street looking up in the air and pointing He esti at it, yet his was the only report we received This seemed to substantiate our theory that people are very hesitant to report UFO's to the Air Force But they evidently do tell the newspapers because later on we picked up a short account of the sighting in the Washi+ngton papers It merely said that hundreds of calls had been received fro in at the rate of twenty or thirty a day, ere glad that people were hesitant to report UFO's, but ere trying to find the answer to a really knotty sighting ished thatyour cake and eating it, too, held even for the UFO
Technically no one in Washi+ngton, besides, of course, Major General Sa policy decisions about the operation of Project Blue Book or the handling of the UFO situation in general Nevertheless, everyone was trying to get into the act The split in opinions on what to do about the rising tide of UFO reports, the split that first ca every day One group was getting dead-serious about the situation They thoughthad plenty of evidence to back up an official state real and, to be specific, not soroup wanted Project Blue Book to quit spending ti to deter foreign to our knowledge and start assuation at trying to find outpolicy, they wanted to claht that the security classification of the project should go up to Top Secret until we had all of the answers, then the inforation of UFO's along these lines should be a ht, and their plans called for lining up many top scientists to devote their full time to the project Soht The enthusiason, at Air Defense Command Headquarters, on the Research and Developovern the orders, and he said to continue to operate just as we had--keeping an open mind to any ideas
After thespell and found ti of reports People were still seeing UFO's but the frequency of the sighting curve was dropping steadily During the first few days of July ere getting only two or three good reports a day
On July 5 the crew of a non-scheduled airlinera UFO over the AEC's supersecret Hanford, Washi+ngton, installation It was a skyhook balloon On the twelfth a huge meteor sliced across Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri that netted us twenty or thirty reports Even before they had stopped co in, we had confirmation from our astronomer that the UFO was ain Chicago that wasn't so easily explained
According to our weather records, on the night of July 12 it was hot in Chicago At nine forty-two there were at least 400 people at Montrose Beach trying to beat the heat Many of the at the stars, so that they saw the UFO as it caree turn directly over their heads, and disappeared over the horizon It was a ”large red light with shts on the side,” ed to a single yellow light as itthis ti any sound
One of the people at the beach was the weather officer from O'Hare International Airport, an Air Force captain He ihts and with radar, but both were negative; radar said that there had been no aircraft in the area of Montrose Beach for several hours
I sent an investigator to Chicago, and although he ca, it didn't add up to be anything known