The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects | Page 7

would never have been organized. It is another class of reports
that causes the Air Force to remain interested in UFO's. This class of
reports are called "Unknowns."
In determining the identity of a UFO, the project based its method of
operation on a well-known psychological premise. This premise is that
to get a reaction from one of the senses there must be a stimulus. If you
think you see a UFO you must have seen something. Pure
hallucinations are extremely rare.
For anything flying in the air the stimulus could be anything that is
normally seen in the air. Balloons, airplanes, and astronomical bodies
are the commoner stimuli. Birds and insects are common also, but
usually are seen at such close range that they are nearly always
recognized. Infrequently observed things, such as sundogs, mirages,
huge fireballs, and a host of other unusual flying objects, are also
known stimuli.
On Project Blue Book our problem was to identify these stimuli. We
had methods for checking the location, at any time, of every balloon
launched anywhere in the United States. To a certain degree the same
was true for airplanes. The UFO observer's estimate of where the object
was located in the sky helped us to identify astronomical bodies. Huge
files of UFO characteristics, along with up-to-the- minute weather data,
and advice from specialists, permitted us to identify such things as
sun-dogs, paper caught in updrafts, huge meteors, etc.
This determination of the stimuli that triggered UFO sightings, while

not an insurmountable task, was a long, tedious process. The
identification of known objects was routine, and caused no excitement.
The excitement and serious interest occurred when we received UFO
reports in which the observer was reliable and the stimuli could not be
identified. These were the reports that challenged the project and
caused me to spend hours briefing top U.S. officials. These were the
reports that we called "Unknowns."
Of the several thousand UFO reports that the Air Force has received
since 1947, some 15 to 20 per cent fall into this category called
unknown. This means that the observer was not affected by any
determinable psychological quirks and that after exhaustive
investigation the object that was reported could not be identified. To be
classed as an unknown, a UFO report also had to be "good," meaning
that it had to come from a competent observer and had to contain a
reasonable amount of data.
Reports are often seen in the newspapers that say: "Mrs. Henry Jones,
of 5464 South Elm, said that 10:00A.M. she was shaking her dust mop
out of the bedroom window when she saw a flying saucer"; or "Henry
Armstrong was driving between Grundy Center and Rienbeck last night
when he saw a light. Henry thinks it was a flying saucer." This is not a
good UFO report.
This type of UFO report, if it was received by Project Blue Book, was
stamped "Insufficient Data for Evaluation" and dropped into the dead
file, where it became a mere statistic.
Next to the "Insufficient Data" file was a file marked "C.P." This meant
crackpot. Into this file went all reports from people who had talked
with flying saucer crews, who had inspected flying saucers that had
landed in the United States, who had ridden in flying saucers, or who
were members of flying saucer crews. By Project Blue Book standards,
these were not "good" UFO reports either.
But here is a "good" UFO report with an "unknown" conclusion:
On July 24, 1952, two Air Force colonels, flying a B-25, took off from

Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco, for Colorado Springs,
Colorado. The day was clear, not a cloud in the sky.
The colonels had crossed the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and
Reno and were flying east at 11,000 feet on "Green 3," the aerial
highway to Salt Lake City. At 3:40P.M. they were over the Carson
Sink area of Nevada, when one of the colonels noticed three objects
ahead of them and a little to their right. The objects looked like three F-
86's flying a tight V formation. If they were F-86's they should have
been lower, according to civil air regulations, but on a clear day some
pilots don't watch their altitude too closely.
In a matter of seconds the three aircraft were close enough to the B- 25
to be clearly seen. They were not F-86's. They were three bright silver,
delta wing craft with no tails and no pilot's canopies. The only thing
that broke the sharply defined, clean upper surface of the triangular
wing was a definite ridge that ran from the nose to the tail.
In another second the three deltas made a slight left bank and shot by
the B-25 at terrific speed. The colonels estimated that the speed was