k of cards behind
the tab "High-Speed Climb." There must have been at least a hundred
cards, each one representing a UFO report in which the reported
object made a high-speed climb. But this was the first time radar had
tracked a UFO during a climb.

During the early part of June, Project Blue Book took another jump
up on the organizational chart. A year before the UFO project had
consisted of one officer. It had risen from the one-man operation to
a project within a group, then to a group, and now it was a section.
Neither Project Sign nor the old Project Grudge had been higher than
the project-within-a-group level. The chief of a group normally calls
for a lieutenant colonel, and since I was just a captain this caused
some consternation in the ranks. There was some talk about putting
Lieutenant Colonel Ray Taylor of Colonel Dunn's staff in charge.
Colonel Taylor was very much interested in UFO's; he had handled some
of the press contacts prior to turning this function over to the
Pentagon and had gone along with me on briefings, so he knew
something about the project. But in the end Colonel Donald Bower, who
was my division chief, decided rank be damned, and I stayed on as
chief of Project Blue Book.

The location within the organizational chart is always indicative of
the importance placed on a project. In June 1952 the Air Force was
taking the UFO problem seriously. One of the reasons was that there
were a lot of good UFO reports coming in from Korea. Fighter pilots
reported seeing silver-colored spheres or disks on several occasions,
and radar in Japan, Okinawa, and in Korea had tracked unidentified
targets.

In June our situation map, on which we kept a plot of all of our
sightings, began to show an ever so slight trend toward reports
beginning to bunch up on the east coast. We discussed this build-up,
but we couldn't seem to find any explainable reason for it so we
decided that we'd better pay special attention to reports coming from
the eastern states.

I had this build-up of reports in mind one Sunday night, June 15 to
be exact, when the OD at ATIC called me at home and said that we were
getting a lot of reports from Virginia. Each report by itself wasn't
too good, the OD told me, but together they seemed to mean something.
He suggested that I come out and take a look at them--so I did.

Individually they weren't too good, but when I lined them up
chronologically and plotted them on a map they took the f