The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects | Page 6

traveled close
to half a million miles. We investigated dozens of UFO reports, and
read and analyzed several thousand more. These included every report
ever received by the Air Force.
For the size of the task involved Project Blue Book was always
understaffed, even though I did have ten people on my regular staff
plus many paid consultants representing every field of science. All of
us on Project Blue Book had Top Secret security clearances so that
security was no block in our investigations. Behind this organization
was a reporting network made up of every Air Force base intelligence
officer and every Air Force radar station in the world, and the Air
Defense Command's Ground Observer Corps. This reporting net sent
Project Blue Book reports on every conceivable type of UFO, by every
conceivable type of person.
What did these people actually see when they reported that they had
observed a UFO? Putting aside truly unidentifiable flying objects for
the present, this question has several answers.
In many instances it has been positively proved that people have
reported balloons, airplanes, stars, and many other common objects as
UFO's. The people who make such reports don't recognize these
common objects because something in their surroundings temporarily
assumes an unfamiliar appearance.
Unusual lighting conditions are a common cause of such illusions. A
balloon will glow like a "ball of fire" just at sunset. Or an airplane that
is not visible to the naked eye suddenly starts to reflect the sun's rays
and appears to be a "silver ball." Pilots in F- 94 jet interceptors chase
Venus in the daytime and fight with balloons at night, and people in
Los Angeles see weird lights.
On October 8, 1954, many Los Angeles newspapers and newscasters
carried an item about a group of flying saucers, bright lights, flying in a
V formation. The lights had been seen from many locations over
Southern California. Pilots saw them while bringing their airplanes into

Los Angeles International Airport, Air Force pilots flying out of Long
Beach saw them, two CBS reporters in Hollywood gave an eyewitness
account, and countless people called police and civil defense officials.
All of them excitedly reported lights they could not identify. The next
day the Air Force identified the UFO's; they were Air Force airplanes,
KC-97 aerial tankers, refueling B-47 jet bombers in flight. The reason
for the weird effect that startled so many Southern Californians was
that when the refueling is taking place a floodlight on the bottom of the
tanker airplane lights up the bomber that is being refueled. The
airplanes were flying high, and slowly, so no sound was heard; only the
bright floodlights could be seen. Since most people, even other pilots,
have never seen a night aerial refueling operation and could not identify
the odd lights they saw, the lights became UFO's.
In other instances common everyday objects look like UFO's because
of some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been in
the sky every day of the observer's life suddenly "takes off at high
speed on a highly erratic flight path." Or a vapor trail from a
high-flying jet--seen a hundred times before by the observer--becomes
a flying saucer.
Some psychologists explain such aberrations as being akin to the crowd
behavior mechanism at work in the "bobby-sox craze." Teen-agers
don't know why they squeal and swoon when their current fetish sways
and croons. Yet everybody else is squealing, so they squeal too. Maybe
that great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: "Everybody
wants to get into the act." I am convinced that a certain percentage of
UFO reports come from people who see flying saucers because others
report seeing them.
But this "will to see" may have deeper roots, almost religious
implications, for some people. Consciously or unconsciously, they
want UFO's to be real and to come from outer space. These individuals,
frightened perhaps by threats of atomic destruction, or lesser
fears--who knows what--act as if nothing that men can do can save the
earth. Instead, they seek salvation from outer space, on the forlorn
premise that flying saucer men, by their very existence, are wiser and

more advanced than we. Such people may reason that a race of men
capable of interplanetary travel have lived well into, or through, an
atomic age. They have survived and they can tell us their secret of
survival. Maybe the threat of an atomic war unified their planet and
allowed them to divert their war effort to one of social and technical
advancement. To such people a searchlight on a cloud or a bright star is
an interplanetary spaceship.
If all the UFO reports that the Air Force has received in the past eight
years could be put in this "psychological quirk" category, Project Blue
Book