-he'd toss it over for me
to read.

Some of the reports were unimpressive, I remember. But a few were
just the opposite. Two that I remember Jerry's showing me made me
wonder how the UFO's could be sloughed off so lightly. The two
reports involved movies taken by Air Force technicians at White Sands
Proving Ground in New Mexico.

The guided missile test range at White Sands is fully instrumented
to track high, fast-moving objects--the guided missiles. Located over
an area of many square miles there are camera stations equipped with
cinetheodolite cameras and linked together by a telephone system.

On April 27, 1950, a guided missile had been fired, and as it roared
up into the stratosphere and fell back to earth, the camera crews had
recorded its flight. All the crews had started to unload their
cameras when one of them spotted an object streaking across the sky.
By April 1950 every person at White Sands was UFO-conscious, so one
member of the camera crew grabbed a telephone headset, alerted the
other crews, and told them to get pictures. Unfortunately only one
camera had film in it, the rest had already been unloaded, and before
they could reload, the UFO was gone. The photos from the one station
showed only a smudgy dark object. About all the film proved was that
something was in the air and whatever it was, it was moving.

Alerted by this first chance to get a UFO to "run a measured
course," the camera crews agreed to keep a sharper lookout. They also
got the official O.K. to "shoot" a UFO if one appeared.

Almost exactly a month later another UFO did appear, or at least at
the time the camera crews thought that it was _a_ UFO. This time the
crews were ready--when the call went out over the telephone net that
a UFO had been spotted, all of the crews scanned the sky. Two of the
crews saw it and shot several feet of film as the shiny, bright
object streaked across the sky.

As soon as the missile tests were completed, the camera crews rushed
their film to the processing lab and then took it to the Data
Reduction Group. But once again the UFO had eluded man because there
were apparently two or more UFO's in the sky and each camera station
had photographed a separate one. The data were no good for
triangulation.

The records at ATIC didn't contain the analysis of these films but
they did mention the Data Reduction Group at White Sands. So when I
later took over the UFO investigation I made several calls in an
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