s, to whom we
referred as our "panel of experts," had been conceived early in 1952--
as soon as serious talk about the possibility that the UFO's might be
interplanetary spaceships had taken hold in both military and
scientific circles. In fact, when Project Grudge was reorganized in
the summer of 1951 the idea had been mentioned, and this was the main
reason that our charter had said we were to be only a fact-finding
group. The people on previous UFO projects had gone off on tangents
of speculation about the identity of the UFO's; they first declared
that they were spacecraft, then later, in a complete about-face, they
took the whole UFO problem as one big belly laugh. Both approaches
had gotten the Air Force into trouble. Why they did this I don't
know, because from the start we realized that no one at ATIC, in the
Air Force, or in the whole military establishment was qualified to
give a final yes or no answer to the UFO problem. Giving a final
answer would require a serious decision--probably one of the most
serious since the beginning of man.

During 1952 many highly qualified engineers and scientists had
visited Project Blue Book and had spent a day or two going over our
reports. Some were very much impressed with the reports--some had all
the answers.

But all of the scientists who read our reports readily admitted that
even though they may have thought that the reports did or did not
indicate visitors from outer space, they would want to give the
subject a good deal more study before they ever committed themselves
in writing. Consequently the people's opinions, although they were
valuable, didn't give us enough to base a decision upon. We still
needed a group to study our material thoroughly and give us written
conclusions and recommendations which could be sent to the President
if necessary.

Our panel of experts was to consist of six or eight of the top
scientists in the United States. We fully realized that even the Air
Force didn't have enough "pull" just to ask all of these people to
drop the important work they were engaged in and spend a week or two
studying our reports. Nor did we want to do it this way; we wanted to
be sure that we had something worth while before asking for their
valuable time. So, working through other government agencies, we
organized a preliminary review panel of four people. All of them were
competent scientists and we knew their reputations were such that if
they recommended t