Part 27 (2/2)

This man said that he'd read every radar report, too, and that there wasn't one that couldn't be explained as a weather phenos In fact, he wasn't even convinced that we had ever gotten such a thing as radar-visual sighting He wanted to see proof that an object that was seen visually was the same object that the radar had picked up Did we have it?

I got back into the discussion at this point with the answer No, we didn't have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of proof needed But we did have reports where the radar and visual bearings of the UFO coincided almost exactly Then we had a few reports where airplanes had followed the UFO's and the maneuvers of the UFO that the pilot reported were the sa tracked by radar

A lieutenant colonel who had been sitting quietly by interjected a well-chosen comment ”It seems the difficulty that Project Blue Book faces is what to accept and what not to accept as proof”

The colonel had hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head

Then he went on, ”Everyone has a different idea of what proof really is Some people think we should accept a new ht testing This is enough proof for them that the airplane will fly But others wouldn't be happy unless it was flight-tested for five or ten years These people have set an unreasonably high value on the word 'proof' The answer is somewhere in between these two extremes”

But where is this point when it comes to UFO's?

There was about a thirty-second pause for thought after the colonel's little speech Then sos at Mainbrace?”

In late September 1952 the NATO naval forces had held maneuvers off the coast of Europe; they were called Operation Mainbrace Before they had started soon had half seriously ence should keep an eye open for UFO's, but no one really expected the UFO's to show up Nevertheless, once again the UFO's were their old unpredictable selves--they were there

On September 20, a US newspaper reporter aboard an aircraft carrier in the North Sea was photographing a carrier take-off in color when he happened to look back down the flight deck and saw a group of pilots and flight deck creatching so in the sky

He went back to look and there was a silver sphereacross the sky just behind the fleet of shi+ps The object appeared to be large, plenty large enough to show up in a photo, so the reporter shot several pictures They were developed right away and turned out to be excellent He had gotten the superstructure of the carrier in each one and, judging by the size of the object in each successive photo, one could see that it was ence officers aboard the carrier studied the photos The object looked like a balloon From its size it was apparent that if it were a balloon, it would have been launched from one of the shi+ps, so the ent out on the TBS radio: ”Who launched a balloon?”

The answer caence double-checked, triple-checked and quadruple- checked every shi+p near the carrier but they could find no one who had launched the UFO

We kept after the Navy The pilots and the flight deck creho saw the UFO had s--some were sure that the UFO was a balloon while others were just as sure that it couldn't have been It was traveling too fast, and although it rese identical to the hundreds of balloons that the crew had seen the aerologists launch

We probably wouldn't have tried so hard to get a definite answer to the Mainbrace photos if it hadn't been for the events that took place during the rest of the operation, I explained to the group of ADC officers

The day after the photos had been taken six RAF pilots flying a for from the direction of the Mainbrace fleet It was a shi+ny, spherical object, and they couldn't recognize it as anything ”friendly” so they took after it But in a minute or two they lost it When they neared their base, one of the pilots looked back and saw that the UFO was now following hiain it outdistanced the Meteor in a matter of minutes

Then on the third consecutive day a UFO showed up near the fleet, this tiland A pilot in a Meteor was scraet his jet fairly close to the UFO, close enough to see that the object was ”round, silvery, and white”

and seemed to ”rotate around its vertical axis and sort of wobble”

But before he could close in to get a really good look it was gone

It was these sightings, I was told by an RAF exchange intelligence officer in the Pentagon, that caused the RAF to officially recognize the UFO

By the tis, it was after the lunch hour in the club and ere getting soet-the- hell-out-of-here looks fro rooest that we leave, Major Sadowski repeated his original question--the one that started the whole discussion--”Are you holding out on us?”

I gave him an unqualified ”No” We wanted more positive proof, and until we had it, UFO's would re objects and noof heads illustrated so more positive proof, however, and I said that just as soon as we returned to Major Sadowski's office I'd tell the

We moved out onto the sidewalk in front of the club and, after discussing a few s, went back into the security area to Sadowski's office and I laid out our plans

First of all, in Nove to shoot the first H-boh this was Top Secret at the time, it was about the most poorly kept secret in history-- everybody seeon had the idea that there were beings, earthly or otherwise, who ht be interested in our activities in the Pacific, as they seemed to be in Operation Mainbrace Consequently Project Blue Book had been directed to get transportation to the test area to set up a reporting net, brief people on how to report, and analyze their reports on the spot

Secondly, Project Blue Book orking on plans for an extensive systeadier General Garland, who had been General Sa herd on the UFO project for General Sa replaced Colonel Dunn, ent to the Air War College General Garland had long been in favor of trying to get soative, about the UFO's

This planned tracking systerid ca developed at ATIC