as anti-
saucer.

Then I went on to say that even though the reports we were getting
were detailed and contained a great deal of good data, we still had
no proof the UFO's were anything real. We could, I said, prove that
all UFO reports were merely the misinterpretation of known objects
_if_ we made a few assumptions.

At this point one of the colonels on General Samford's staff stopped
me. "Isn't it true," he asked, "that if you make a few positive
assumptions instead of negative assumptions you can just as easily
prove that the UFO's are interplanetary spaceships? Why, when you
have to make an assumption to get an answer to a report, do you
always pick the assumption that proves the UFO's don't exist?"

You could almost hear the colonel add, "O.K., so now I've said it."

For several months the belief that Project Blue Book was taking a
negative attitude and the fact that the UFO's could be interplanetary
spaceships had been growing in the Pentagon, but these ideas were
usually discussed only in the privacy of offices with doors that
would close tight.

No one said anything, so the colonel who had broken the ice plunged
in. He used the sighting from Goose AFB, where the fireball had
buzzed the C-54 and sent the OD and his driver belly-whopping under
the command car as an example. The colonel pointed out that even
though we had labeled the report "Unknown" it wasn't accepted as
proof. He wanted to know why.

I said that our philosophy was that the fireball could have been two
meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across
the airfield at Goose AFB. Granted a meteor doesn't come within feet
of an airplane or make a 90-degree turn, but these could have been
optical illusions of some kind. The crew of the C-54, the OD, his
driver, and the tower operators didn't recognize the UFO's as meteors
because they were used to seeing the normal "shooting stars" that are
most commonly seen.

But the colonel had some more questions. "What are the chances of
having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling
the same direction, only five minutes apart?"

I didn't know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather
small, I had to admit.

Then he asked, "What kind of an optical illusion would cause a
meteor to appear to make a 90-degree turn?"

I had asked our Project Bear astronomer this same question, and he
couldn't answer it either. So the only answer I could give the
colon