July 1953 and took over another job,
Lieutenant Olsson was just getting out of the Air Force and Al/c
Futch was now it. He said that he felt like the President of
Antarctica on a non-expedition year. In a few days I again had
Project Blue Book, as an additional duty this time, and I had orders
to "build it up."

While I had been gone, our instrumentation plan had been rejected.
Higher headquarters had decided against establishing a net of manned
tracking stations, astronomical cameras tied in with radars, and our
other proposed instrumentation. General Garland had argued long and
hard for the plan, but he'd lost. It was decided that the cameras
with diffraction gratings over the lenses, the cameras that had been
under development for a year, would suffice.

The camera program had started out as a top-priority project, but it
had lost momentum fast when we'd tested these widely publicized
instruments and found that they wouldn't satisfactorily photograph a
million-candle power flare at 450 yards. The cameras themselves were
all right, but in combination with the gratings, they were no good.
However, Lieutenant Olsson had been told to send them out, so he sent
them out.

The first thing that I did when I returned to Project Blue Book was
to go over the reports that had come in while I was away. There were
several good reports but only one that was exceptional. It had taken
place at Luke AFB, Arizona, the Air Force's advanced fighter-bomber
school that is named after the famous "balloon buster" of World War
I, Lieutenant Frank Luke, Jr. It was a sighting that produced some
very interesting photographs.

There were only a few high cirrus clouds in the sky late on the
morning of March 3 when a pilot took off from Luke in an F-84 jet to
log some time. He had been flying F-51's in Korea and had recently
started to check out in the jets. He took off, cleared the traffic
pattern, and started climbing toward Blythe Radio, about 130 miles
west of Luke. He'd climbed for several minutes and had just picked up
the coded letters BLH that identified Blythe Radio when he looked up
through the corner glass in the front part of his canopy--high at
about two o'clock he saw what he thought was an airplane angling
across his course from left to right leaving a long, thin vapor
trail. He glanced down at his altimeter and saw that he was at 23,000
feet. The object that was leaving the vapor trail must really be
high, he remembered thinki