into the northwest. The time was 10:47P.M.

The control tower operators saw the fireball too, but didn't agree
with the OD and his driver on how low it was. They did think that it
had made a 90-degree turn and they didn't think that it was a meteor.
In the years they'd been in towers they'd seen hundreds of meteors,
but they'd never seen anything like this, they reported.

And reports continued to pour into Project Blue Book. It was now not
uncommon to get ten or eleven wires in one day. If the letters
reporting UFO sightings were counted, the total would rise to twenty
or thirty a day. The majority of the reports that came in by wire
could be classified as being good. They were reports made by reliable
people and they were full of details. Some were reports of balloons,
airplanes, etc., but the percentage of unknowns hovered right around
22 per cent.

To describe and analyze each report, or even the unknowns, would
require a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, so I am covering
only the best and most representative cases.

One day in mid-June, Colonel Dunn called me. He was leaving for
Washington and he wanted me to come in the next day to give a
briefing at a meeting. By this time I was taking these briefings as a
matter of course. We usually gave the briefings to General Garland
and a general from the Research and Development Board, who passed the
information on to General Samford, the Director of Intelligence. But
this time General Samford, some of the members of his staff, two Navy
captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and some people I
can't name were at the briefing.

When I arrived in Washington, Major Fournet told me that the purpose of
the meetings, and my briefing, was to try to find out if there was any
significance to the almost alarming increase in UFO reports over the
past few weeks. By the time that everyone had finished signing into the
briefing room in the restricted area of the fourth-floor "B" ring of the
Pentagon, it was about 9:15A.M. I started my briefing as soon as
everyone was seated.

I reviewed the last month's UFO activities; then I briefly went over
the more outstanding "Unknown" UFO reports and pointed out how they
were increasing in number--breaking all previous records. I also
pointed out that even though the UFO subject was getting a lot of
publicity, it wasn't the scare-type publicity that had accompanied
the earlier flaps--in fact, much of the present publicity w