crudest of fakes, automobile hub caps thrown into the air,
homemade saucers suspended by threads, and just plain retouched
negatives. The rest of the still photos had been sent in by well-
meaning citizens who couldn't recognize a light flare of flaw in the
negative, or who had chanced to get an excellent photo of a sundog or
mirage.

But the movies that were sent in to us were different. In the first
place, it takes an expert with elaborate equipment to fake a movie.
We had or knew about four strips of movie film that fell into the
"Unknown" category. Two were the cinetheodolite movies that had been
taken at White Sands Proving Ground in April and May of 1950, one was
the Montana Movie and the last was the Tremonton Movie. These latter
two had been subjected to thousands of hours of analysis, and since
we planned to give the panel of scientists more thorough reports on
them on Friday, I skipped over their details and went to the next
point I wanted to cover--theories.

Periodically throughout the history of the UFO people have come up
with widely publicized theories to explain all UFO reports. The one
that received the most publicity was the one offered by Dr. Donald
Menzel of Harvard University. Dr. Menzel, writing in _Time_, _Look_,
and later in his _Flying_ _Saucers_, claimed that all UFO reports
could be explained as various types of light phenomena. We studied
this theory thoroughly because it did seem to have merit. Project
Bear's physicists studied it. ATIC's scientific consultants studied
it and discussed it with several leading European physicists whose
specialty was atmospheric physics. In general the comments that
Project Blue Book received were, "He's given the subject some thought
but his explanations are not the panacea."

And there were other widely publicized theories. One man said that
they were all skyhook balloons, but we knew the flight path of every
skyhook balloon and they were seldom reported as UFO's. Their little
brothers, the weather balloons, caused us a great deal more trouble.

The Army Engineers took a crack at solving the UFO problem by making
an announcement that a scientist in one of their laboratories had
duplicated a flying saucer in his laboratory. Major Dewey Fournet
checked into this one. It had all started out as a joke, but it was
picked up as fact and the scientist was stuck with it. He gained some
publicity but lost prestige because other scientists wondered just
how comp