out the
UFO but just to work the subject into a friendly conversation. This
way we hoped to get a completely frank opinion. To protect his fellow
astronomers, our astronomer gave them all code names and he kept the
key to the code.

The report we received expressed the detailed opinions of forty-five
recognized authorities. Their opinions varied from that of Dr. C, who
regarded the UFO project as a "silly waste of money to investigate an
even sillier subject," to Dr. L, who has spent a great deal of his
own valuable time personally investigating UFO reports because he
believes that they are something "real." Of the forty-five
astronomers who were interviewed, 36 per cent were not at all
interested in the UFO reports, 41 per cent were interested to the
point of offering their services if they were ever needed, and 23 per
cent thought that the UFO's were a much more serious problem than
most people recognized.

None of the astronomers, even during a friendly discussion, admitted
that he thought the UFO's could be interplanetary vehicles. All of
those who were interested would only go so far as to say, "We don't
know what they are, but they're something real."

During the past few years I have heard it said that if the UFO's
were really "solid objects" our astronomers would have seen them. Our
study shed some light on this point--astronomers have seen UFO's.
None of them has ever seen or photographed anything resembling a UFO
through his telescope, but 11 per cent of the forty-five men had seen
something that they couldn't explain. Although, technically speaking,
these sightings were no better than hundreds of others in our files
as far as details were concerned, they were good because of the
caliber of the observer. Astronomers know what is in the sky.

It is interesting to note that out of the representative cross
section of astronomers, five of them, or 11 per cent, had sighted
UFO's. For a given group of people this is well above average. To
check this point, the astronomer who was making our study picked
ninety people at random--people he met while traveling--and got them
into a conversation about flying saucers. These people were his
"control group," to borrow a term from the psychologists. Although
the percentage of people who were interested in UFO's was higher for
the control group than for the group of astronomers, only 41 per cent
of the astronomers were interested while 86 per cent of the control
group we