o
get into the act. The split in opinions on what to do about the
rising tide of UFO reports, the split that first came out in the open
at General Samford's briefing, was widening every day. One group was
getting dead-serious about the situation. They thought we now had
plenty of evidence to back up an official statement that the UFO's
were something real and, to be specific, not something from this
earth. This group wanted Project Blue Book to quit spending time
investigating reports from the standpoint of trying to determine if
the observer of a UFO had actually seen something foreign to our
knowledge and start assuming that he or she had. They wanted me to
aim my investigation at trying to find out more about the UFO. Along
with this switch in operating policy, they wanted to clamp down on
the release of information. They thought that the security
classification of the project should go up to Top Secret until we had
all of the answers, then the information should be released to the
public. The investigation of UFO's along these lines should be a
maximum effort, they thought, and their plans called for lining up
many top scientists to devote their full time to the project. Someone
once said that enthusiasm is infectious, and he was right. The
enthusiasm of this group took a firm hold in the Pentagon, at Air
Defense Command Headquarters, on the Research and Development Board,
and many other agencies throughout the government. But General
Samford was still giving the orders, and he said to continue to
operate just as we had--keeping an open mind to any ideas.

After the minor flurry of reports on July 1 we had a short breathing
spell and found time to clean up a sizable backlog of reports. People
were still seeing UFO's but the frequency of the sighting curve was
dropping steadily. During the first few days of July we were getting
only two or three good reports a day.

On July 5 the crew of a non-scheduled airliner made page two of many
newspapers by reporting a UFO over the AEC's supersecret Hanford,
Washington, installation. It was a skyhook balloon. On the twelfth a
huge meteor sliced across Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri
that netted us twenty or thirty reports. Even before they had stopped
coming in, we had confirmation from our astronomer that the UFO was a
meteor.

But forty-two minutes later there was a sighting in Chicago that
wasn't so easily explained.

According to our weather records, on the