ntists and engineers who had reviewed the
UFO material at ATIC had made one strong point: we should give top
priority to getting reasonably accurate measurements of the speed,
altitude, and size of reported UFO's. This would serve two purposes.
First, it would make it easy to sort out reports of common things,
such as balloons, airplanes, etc. Second, and more important, if we
could get even one fairly accurate measurement that showed that some
object was traveling through the atmosphere at high speed, and that
it wasn't a meteor, the UFO riddle would be much easier to solve.

I had worked out a plan to get some measured data, and I presented
it to the group for their comments.

I felt sure that before long the press would get wind of the Air
Force's renewed effort to identify UFO's. When this happened, instead
of being mysterious about the whole thing, we would freely admit the
existence of the new project, explain the situation thoroughly and
exactly as it was, and say that all UFO reports made to the Air Force
would be given careful consideration. In this way we would encourage
more people to report what they were seeing and we might get some
good data.

To further explain my point, I drew a sketch on a blackboard.
Suppose that a UFO is reported over a fair-sized city. Now we may get
one or two reports, and these reports may be rather sketchy. This
does us no good--all we can conclude is that somebody saw something
that he couldn't identify. But suppose fifty people from all over the
city report the UFO. Then it would be profitable for us to go out and
talk to these people, find out the time they saw the UFO, and where
they saw it (the direction and height above the horizon). Then we
might be able to use these data, work out a triangulation problem,
and get a fairly accurate measurement of speed, altitude, and size.

Radar, of course, will give an accurate measurement of speed and
altitude, I pointed out, but radar is not infallible. There is always
the problem of weather. To get accurate radar data on a UFO, it is
always necessary to prove that it wasn't weather that was causing the
target. Radar is valuable, and we wanted radar reports, I said, but
they should be considered only as a parallel effort and shouldn't
take the place of visual sightings.

In winding up my briefing, I again stressed the point that, as of
the end of 1951--the date of this briefing--there was no positive
proof that any craft foreign t