nocent circumstances triggered by the broadcast had caused people
to completely lose all sense of good judgment--to panic. There were
some similar reports in our UFO files.

But we had many reports in which people reported UFO's and obviously
hadn't panicked. Reports from pilots who had seen mysterious lights
at night and, thinking that they might be a cockpit reflection, had
turned off all their cockpit lights. Or the pilots who turned and
rolled their airplanes to see if they could change the angle of
reflection and get rid of the UFO. Or those pilots who climbed and
dove thousands of feet and then leveled out to see if the UFO would
change its relative position to the airplane. Or the amateur
astronomer who made an excellent sighting and before he reluctantly
reported it as a UFO had talked to a half dozen professional
astronomers and physicists in hopes of finding an explanation. All of
these people were thinking clearly, questioning themselves as to what
the sightings could be; then trying to answer their questions. These
people weren't panicked.

The question-and-answer period went on for a full day as the
scientists dug into the details of the general facts I had given them
in my briefing.

The following day and a half was devoted to reviewing and discussing
fifty of our best sighting reports that we had classed as "Unknowns."

The next item on the agenda, when the panel had finished absorbing
all of the details of the fifty selected top reports, was a review of
a very hot and very highly controversial study. It was based on the
idea that Major Dewey Fournet and I had talked about several months
before--an analysis of the motions of the reported UFO's in an
attempt to determine whether they were intelligently controlled. The
study was hot because it wasn't official and the reason it wasn't
official was because it was so hot. It concluded that the UFO's were
interplanetary spaceships. The report had circulated around high
command levels of intelligence and it had been read with a good deal
of interest. But even though some officers at command levels just a
notch below General Samford bought it, the space behind the words
"Approved by" was blank--no one would stick his neck out and
officially send it to the top.

Dewey Fournet, who had completed his tour of active duty in the Air
Force and was now a civilian, was called from Houston, Texas, to tell
the scientists about the study since he had worked very close