Part 31 (1/2)

Thooofed on that prediction

I had oneand opened thethe past year and a half we had had several astronomers visit Project Blue Book, and they were not at all hesitant to give us their opinions but they didn't care to say h they did indicate that they were thinking We decided that the opinions and comments of astronomers would be of value, so late in 1952 we took a poll We asked an astronomer, e knew to be unbiased about the UFO proble astronomer in the United States, to take a trip and talk to his friends We asked hi about the UFO but just to work the subject into a friendly conversation This e hoped to get a completely frank opinion To protect his fellow astronoave them all code names and he kept the key to the code

The report we received expressed the detailed opinions of forty-five recognized authorities Their opinions varied froarded the UFO project as a ”silly waste of ate an even sillier subject,” to Dr L, who has spent a great deal of his own valuable ti UFO reports because he believes that they are so ”real” Of the forty-five astronomers ere interviewed, 36 per cent were not at all interested in the UFO reports, 41 per cent were interested to the point of offering their services if they were ever needed, and 23 per cent thought that the UFO's were a nized

None of the astrono a friendly discussion, adht the UFO's could be interplanetary vehicles All of those ere interested would only go so far as to say, ”We don't knohat they are, but they're so the past few years I have heard it said that if the UFO's were really ”solid objects” our astronoht on this point--astronomers have seen UFO's

None of the a UFO through his telescope, but 11 per cent of the forty-five h, technically speaking, these sightings were no better than hundreds of others in our files as far as details were concerned, they were good because of the caliber of the observer Astrono to note that out of the representative cross section of astronoiven group of people this is well above average To check this point, the astrono our study picked ninety people at randoot the saucers These people were his ”control group,” to borrow a tere of people ere interested in UFO's was higher for the control group than for the group of astronomers, only 41 per cent of the astronoroup were interested; 11 per cent of the astronomers had seen UFO's, while only about 1 per cent of the control group had seen one This seeroup astronoe citizen

When I finished , it was too late to start the question- and-answer session, so the first day'sadjourned But proathered, and from the looks of the list of questions so about UFO's all night

One of the first questions was about the results of photography taken by the pairs of huge ”meteorite patrol” cahout North Araph a UFO? The caht, can photograph very diraphed its speed and altitude can be very accurately established If there were any objects giving off light as they flew through our atht have photographed them But they hadn't

At first this seemed to be an important piece of evidence and we had just about racked this fact up as a definite score against the UFO e did a little checking If the UFO had been flying at an altitude of 100picked up by the ca so any loould be less

Thisastronomer”

was at the meteorite patrol camera sites, he talked to an astrono one of the patrol cameras

Many people have asked why our astrono telescopes They are focused light-years away and their field of vision is so narrow that even if UFO's did exist and littered the atmosphere they wouldn't be seen

Another question the panel had was about Orson Welles' famous _War_ _of_ _the_ _Worlds_ broadcast of October 1938, which caused thousands of people to panic Had we studied this to see if there were any si?

We had

Our psychologist looked into the et a positive ansould require an effort that would dwarf the entire UFO project But he did have a few comments There were many documented cases in which a series of innocent circuered by the broadcast had caused people to coment--to panic There were some similar reports in our UFO files

But we had many reports in which people reported UFO's and obviously hadn't panicked Reports fro that they ht 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 a and before he reluctantly reported it as a UFO had talked to a half dozen professional astrono an explanation All of these people were thinking clearly, questioning the 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 the day and a half was devoted to reviewing and discussing fifty of our best sighting reports that we had classed as ”Unknowns”

The next ite 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 atteently 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 spaceshi+ps The report had circulated around high coood deal of interest But even though some officers at coht 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, astrono 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

The next step in the study, Fournet explained, was to find out where they ca the final answer--spacemen