d he'd covered, but when he first picked up Blythe Radio he was
on Green 5 airway, about 30 miles west of his base, and when he'd
given up the chase he'd gotten another radio bearing, and he was now
almost up to Needles Radio, 70 miles north of Blythe. He could see a
lake, Lake Mojave, in the distance.

Could a high-altitude jet-stream wind have been blowing the smoke
cloud? Futch had checked this--no. The winds above 20,000 feet were
the usual westerlies and the jet stream was far to the north.

Several months later I talked to a captain who had been at Luke when
this sighting occurred. He knew the F-84 pilot and he'd heard him
tell his story in great detail. I won't say that he was a confirmed
believer, but he was interested. "I never thought much about these
reports before," he said, "but I know this guy well. He's not nuts.
What do you think he saw?"

I don't know what he saw. Maybe he didn't travel as far as he
thought he did. If he didn't, then I'd guess that he saw a meteor's
smoke trail. But if he did know that he'd covered some 80 miles
during the chase, I'd say that he saw a UFO--a real one. And I find
it hard to believe that pilots don't know what they're doing.

During the summer of 1953, UFO reports dropped off considerably.
During May, June, and July of 1952 we'd received 637 good reports.
During the same months in 1953 we received only seventy-six. We had
been waiting for the magic month of July to roll around again because
every July there had been the sudden and unexplained peak in
reporting; we wanted to know if it would happen again. It didn't--
only twenty-one reports came in, to make July the lowest month of the
year. But July did bring new developments.

Project Blue Book got a badly needed shot in the arm when an
unpublicized but highly important change took place: another
intelligence agency began to take over all field investigations.

Ever since I'd returned to the project, the orders had been to build
it up--get more people--do what the panel recommended. But when I'd
asked for more people, all I got was a polite "So sorry." So, I did
the next best thing and tried to find some organization already in
being which could and would help us. I happened to be expounding my
troubles one day at Air Defense Command Headquarters while I was
briefing General Burgess, ADC's Director of Intelligence, and he told
me about his 4602nd Air Intelligence Squadron, a specialized
intelligence unit that had