sory Committee
for Aeronautics Laboratory at Langley AFB, a government agency which
specializes in aeronautical research. They didn't know. Neither they
nor anybody else had ever done any research on this question. Their
opinion was that such an aircraft could not be heard 5,000 or 10,000
feet away. Aerodynamicists at Wright Field's Aircraft Laboratory
agreed.

I called the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen
Proving Grounds, Maryland, to find out why artillery shells whine.
These people develop and test all kinds of shells so they would have
an answer if anybody did. They said that the majority of the whine of
an artillery shell is probably caused by the flat back end of the
shell. If a perfectly streamlined shell could be used it would not
have any perceivable whine.

What I found out, or didn't find out, about the sound of an object
moving at several times the speed of sound was typical of nearly
every question that came up regarding UFO's. We were working in a
field where there were no definite answers to questions. In some
instances we were getting into fields far advanced above the then
present levels of research. In other instances we were getting into
fields where no research had been done at all. It made the problem of
UFO analysis one of getting opinions. All we could do was hope the
opinions we were getting were the best.

My attempts to reach a definite conclusion as to what the professors
had seen met another blank wall. I had no more success than I'd had
trying to reach a conclusion on the authenticity of the photographs.

A thorough analysis of the reports of the flying wings seen by the
retired rancher's wife in Lubbock and the AEC employee and his wife
in Albuquerque was made. The story from the two ladies who saw the
aluminum-colored pear-shaped object hovering near the road near
Matador, Texas, was studied, checked, and rechecked. Another blank
wall on all three of these sightings.

By the time I got around to working on the report from the radar
station in Washington State, the data of the weather conditions that
existed on the night of the sighting had arrived. I turned the
incident folder over to the electronics specialists at ATIC. They
made the analysis and determined that the targets were caused by
weather, although it was a borderline case. They further surmised
that since the targets had been picked up on two radars, if I checked
I'd find out that the two targets looked d