ng any imagination or
wild assumptions, it looked as if two "somethings" had come down
across Boston on a southwesterly heading, crossed Long Island,
hovered for a few minutes over the Army's secret laboratories at Fort
Monmouth, then proceeded toward Washington. In a way we half expected
to get a report from Washington. Our expectations were rewarded
because in a few hours a report arrived from that city.

A physics professor at George Washington University reported a
"dull, gray, smoky-colored" object which hovered north northwest of
Washington for about eight minutes. Every once in a while, the
professor reported, it would move through an arc of about 15 degrees
to the right or left, but it always returned to its original
position. While he was watching the UFO he took a 25-cent piece out
of his pocket and held it at arm's length so that he could compare
its size to that of the UFO. The UFO was about half the diameter of
the quarter. When he first saw the UFO, it was about 30 to 40 degrees
above the horizon, but during the eight minutes it was in sight it
steadily dropped lower and lower until buildings in downtown
Washington blocked off the view.

Besides being an "Unknown," this report was exceptionally
interesting to us because the sighting was made from the center of
downtown Washington, D.C. The professor reported that he had noticed
the UFO when he saw people all along the street looking up in the air
and pointing. He estimated that at least 500 people were looking at
it, yet his was the only report we received. This seemed to
substantiate our theory that people are very hesitant to report UFO's
to the Air Force. But they evidently do tell the newspapers because
later on we picked up a short account of the sighting in the
Washington papers. It merely said that hundreds of calls had been
received from people reporting a UFO.

When reports were pouring in at the rate of twenty or thirty a day,
we were glad that people were hesitant to report UFO's, but when we
were trying to find the answer to a really knotty sighting we always
wished that more people had reported it. The old adage of having your
cake and eating it, too, held even for the UFO.

Technically no one in Washington, besides, of course, Major General
Samford and his superiors, had anything to do with making policy
decisions about the operation of Project Blue Book or the handling of
the UFO situation in general. Nevertheless, everyone was trying t