rd amounts. The lack of newspaper
publicity after the Washington sightings had had some effect because
the number of reports dropped from nearly 500 in July to 175 in
August, but this was still far above the normal average of twenty to
thirty reports a month.

September 1952 started out with a rush, and for a while it looked as
if UFO sightings were on the upswing again. For some reason, we never
could determine why, we suddenly began to get reports from all over
the southeastern United States. Every morning, for about a week or
two, we'd have a half dozen or so new reports. Georgia and Alabama
led the field. Many of the reports came from people in the vicinity
of the then new super-hush-hush Atomic Energy Commission facility at
Savannah River, Georgia. And many were coming from the port city of
Mobile, Alabama. Our first thought, when the reports began to pour
in, was that the newspapers in these areas were possibly stirring
things up with scare stories, but our newspaper clipping service
covered the majority of the southern papers, and although we kept
looking for publicity, none showed up. In fact, the papers only
barely mentioned one or two of the sightings. As they came in, each
of the sighting reports went through our identification process; they
were checked against all balloon flights, aircraft flights, celestial
bodies, and the MO file, but more than half of them came out as
unknowns.

When the reports first began to come in, I had called the
intelligence officers at all of the major military installations in
the Southeast unsuccessfully trying to find out if they could shed
any light on the cause of the sightings. One man, the man who was
responsible for UFO reports made to Brookley AFB, just outside of
Mobile, Alabama, took a dim view of all of the proceedings. "They're
all nuts," he said.

About a week later his story changed. It seems that one night, about
the fourth night in a row that UFO's had been reported near Mobile,
this man and several of his assistants decided to try to see these
famous UFO's; about 10:00P.M., the time that the UFO's were usually
reported, they were gathered around the telephone in the man's office
at Brookley AFB. Soon a report came in. The first question that the
investigator who answered the phone asked was, "Can you still see it?"

The answer was "Yes," so the officer took off to see the UFO.

The same thing happened twice more, and two more officers left for
different l