el was, "I don't know." I felt as if I were on a witness stand
being cross-examined, and that is exactly where I was, because the
colonel cut loose.

"Why not assume a point that is more easily proved?" he asked. "Why
not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower
operators did know what they were talking about? Maybe they had seen
spectacular meteors during the hundreds of hours that they had flown
at night and the many nights that they had been on duty in the tower.
Maybe the ball of fire had made a 90-degree turn. Maybe it was some
kind of an intelligently controlled craft that had streaked northeast
across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an
hour.

"Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?"
the colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.

This last comment started a lively discussion, and I was able to
retreat. The colonel had been right in a sense--we were being
conservative, but maybe this was the right way to be. In any
scientific investigation you always assume that you don't have enough
proof until you get a positive answer. I don't think that we had a
positive answer--yet.

The colonel's comments split the group, and a hot exchange of ideas,
pros and cons, and insinuations that some people were imitating
ostriches to keep from facing the truth followed.

The outcome of the meeting was a directive to take further steps to
obtain positive identification of the UFO's. Our original idea of
attempting to get several separate reports from one sighting so we
could use triangulation to measure speed, altitude, and size wasn't
working out. We had given the idea enough publicity, but reports
where triangulation could be used were few and far between. Mr. or
Mrs. Average Citizen just doesn't look up at the sky unless he or she
sees a flash of light or hears a sound. Then even if he or she does
look up and sees a UFO, it is very seldom that the report ever gets
to Project Blue Book. I think that it would be safe to say that Blue
Book only heard about 10 per cent of the UFO's that were seen in the
United States.

After the meeting I went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don
Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to some people about how
to get better UFO data. We brought back the idea of using an
extremely long focal-length camera equipped with a diffraction grating.

The cameras would be placed at various locations thro