ligence
information, or the dramatic entrance of a well-stacked female into
an officers' club bar.

In early June 1952 the Air Force was unknowingly in the initial
stages of a flap--a flying saucer flap--_the_ flying saucer flap of
1952. The situation had never been duplicated before, and it hasn't
been duplicated since. All records for the number of UFO reports were
not just broken, they were disintegrated. In 1948, 167 UFO reports
had come into ATIC; this was considered a big year. In June 1952 we
received 149. During the four years the Air Force had been in the UFO
business, 615 reports had been collected. During the "Big Flap" our
incoming-message log showed 717 reports.

To anyone who had anything to do with flying saucers, the summer of
1952 was just one big swirl of UFO reports, hurried trips, midnight
telephone calls, reports to the Pentagon, press interviews, and very
little sleep.

If you can pin down a date that the Big Flap started, it would
probably be about June 1.

It was also on June 1 that we received a good report of a UFO that
had been picked up on radar. June 1 was a Sunday, but I'd been at the
office all day getting ready to go to Los Alamos the next day. About
5:00P.M. the telephone rang and the operator told me that I had a
long-distance call from California. My caller was the chief of a
radar test section for Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, and he
was very excited about a UFO he had to report.

That morning he and his test crew had been checking out a new late-
model radar to get it ready for some tests they planned to run early
Monday morning. To see if their set was functioning properly, they
had been tracking jets in the Los Angeles area. About midmorning, the
Hughes test engineer told me, the jet traffic had begun to drop off,
and they were about ready to close down their operation when one of
the crew picked up a slow-moving target coming across the San Gabriel
Mountains north of Los Angeles. He tracked the target for a few
minutes and, from the speed and altitude, decided that it was a DC-3.
It was at 11,000 feet and traveling about 180 miles an hour toward
Santa Monica. The operator was about ready to yell at the other crew
members to shut off the set when he noticed something mighty odd--
there was a big gap between the last and the rest of the regularly
spaced bright spots on the radarscope. The man on the scope called
the rest of the crew in because DC-3's just don't trip