every loophole. Then they found one.

In measuring the brilliance of the lights, the photo analysts had
used an instrument called a densitometer. The astronomer on the panel
knew all about measuring the density of an extremely small
photographic image with a densitometer because he did it all the time
in his studies of the stars. And the astronomer didn't think that the
Navy analysts had used the correct technique in making their
measurements. This didn't necessarily mean that their data were all
wrong, but it did mean that they should recheck their work.

When the discussion of the Navy's report ended, one of the
scientists asked to see the Tremonton Movie again; so I had the
projectionists run it several more times. The man said that he
thought the UFO's could be sea gulls soaring on a thermal current. He
lived in Berkeley and said that he'd seen gulls high in the air over
San Francisco Bay. We had thought of this possibility several months
before because the area around the Great Salt Lake is inhabited by
large white gulls. But the speed of the lone UFO as it left the main
group had eliminated the gulls. I pointed this out to the physicist.
His answer was that the Navy warrant officer might have thought he
had held the camera steady, but he could have "panned with the
action" unconsciously. This would throw all of our computations 'way
off. I agreed with this, but I couldn't agree that they were sea gulls.

But several months later I was in San Francisco waiting for an
airliner to Los Angeles and I watched gulls soaring in a cloudless
sky. They were "riding a thermal," and they were so high that you
couldn't see them until they banked just a certain way; then they
appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would
expect from sea gulls. There was a strong resemblance to the UFO's in
the Tremonton Movie. But I'm not sure that this is the answer.

The presentation of the two movies ended Project Blue Book's part of
the meeting. In five days we had given the panel of scientists every
pertinent detail in the history of the UFO, and it was up to them to
tell us if they were real--some type of vehicle flying through our
atmosphere. If they were real, then they would have to be spacecraft
because no one at the meeting gave a second thought to the
possibility that the UFO's might be a supersecret U.S. aircraft or a
Soviet development. The scientists knew everything that was going on
in the U.S. and they kne