ng saucers. It did take
the pressure off Project Blue Book--reports dropped from fifty per
day to ten a day inside of a week--but behind the scenes the press
conference was only the signal for an all-out drive to find out more
about the UFO. Work on the special cameras continued on a high-
priority basis, and General Samford directed us to enlist the aid of
top-ranking scientists.

During the past four months we had collected some 750 comparatively
well-documented reports, and we hoped that something in these reports
might give us a good lead on the UFO. My orders were to tell the
scientists to whom we talked that the Air Force was officially still
very much interested in the UFO and that their assistance, even if it
was only in giving us ideas and comments on the reports, was badly
needed. Although the statement of the problem was worded much more
loosely, in essence it was, "Do the UFO reports we have collected
indicate that the earth is being visited by a people from another
planet?"

Such questions had been asked of the scientists before, but not in
such a serious vein.

Then a secondary program was to be started, one of "educating" the
military. The old idea that UFO reports would die out when the thrill
wore off had long been discarded. We all knew that UFO reports would
continue to come in and that in order to properly evaluate them we
had to have every shred of evidence. The Big Flap had shown us that
our chances of getting a definite answer on a sighting was directly
proportional to the quality of the information we received from the
intelligence officers in the field.

But soon after the press conference we began to get wires from
intelligence officers saying they had interpreted the newspaper
accounts of General Samford's press conference to mean that we were
no longer interested in UFO reports. A few other intelligence
officers had evidently also misinterpreted the general's remarks
because their reports of excellent sightings were sloppy and
incomplete. All of this was bad, so to forestall any misconceived
ideas about the future of the Air Force's UFO project, summaries of
General Samford's press conference were distributed to intelligence
officers. General Samford had outlined the future of the UFO project
when he'd said:

"So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with
the best of our ability, giving it the attention that we feel it very
definitely warrants. We will give it ad