me object
that the radar had picked up. Did we have it?

I got back into the discussion at this point with the answer. No, we
didn't have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of
proof needed. But we did have reports where the radar and visual
bearings of the UFO coincided almost exactly. Then we had a few
reports where airplanes had followed the UFO's and the maneuvers of
the UFO that the pilot reported were the same as the maneuvers of the
UFO that was being tracked by radar.

A lieutenant colonel who had been sitting quietly by interjected a
well-chosen comment. "It seems the difficulty that Project Blue Book
faces is what to accept and what not to accept as proof."

The colonel had hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head.

Then he went on, "Everyone has a different idea of what proof really
is. Some people think we should accept a new model of an airplane
after only five or ten hours of flight testing. This is enough proof
for them that the airplane will fly. But others wouldn't be happy
unless it was flight-tested for five or ten years. These people have
set an unreasonably high value on the word 'proof.' The answer is
somewhere in between these two extremes."

But where is this point when it comes to UFO's?

There was about a thirty-second pause for thought after the
colonel's little speech. Then someone asked, "What about these recent
sightings at Mainbrace?"

In late September 1952 the NATO naval forces had held maneuvers off
the coast of Europe; they were called Operation Mainbrace. Before
they had started someone in the Pentagon had half seriously mentioned
that Naval Intelligence should keep an eye open for UFO's, but no one
really expected the UFO's to show up. Nevertheless, once again the
UFO's were their old unpredictable selves--they were there.

On September 20, a U.S. newspaper reporter aboard an aircraft
carrier in the North Sea was photographing a carrier take-off in
color when he happened to look back down the flight deck and saw a
group of pilots and flight deck crew watching something in the sky.
He went back to look and there was a silver sphere moving across the
sky just behind the fleet of ships. The object appeared to be large,
plenty large enough to show up in a photo, so the reporter shot
several pictures. They were developed right away and turned out to
be excellent. He had gotten the superstructure of the carrier in each
one and, judging by the size of the ob