hierarchy of the world
science, said, "It can't be." Then he went on to explain that flight
without gas bags would require the discovery of some new material or
a new force in nature.

And at the same time Rear Admiral George W. Melville, then Chief
Engineer for the U.S. Navy, said that attempts to fly heavier-than-
air vehicles was absurd.

Just a little over ten years ago there was another "it can't be." Ex-
President Harry S. Truman recalls in the first volume of the Truman
_Memoirs_ what Admiral William D. Leahy, then Chief of Staff to the
President, had to say about the atomic bomb. "That is the biggest
fool thing we have ever done," he is quoted as saying. "The bomb will
never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."

Personally, I don't believe that "it can't be." I wouldn't class
myself as a "believer," exactly, because I've seen too many UFO
reports that first appeared to be unexplainable fall to pieces when
they were thoroughly investigated. But every time I begin to get
skeptical I think of the other reports, the many reports made by
experienced pilots and radar operators, scientists, and other people
who know what they're looking at. These reports were thoroughly
investigated and they are still unknowns. Of these reports, the radar-
visual sightings are the most convincing. When a ground radar picks
up a UFO target and a ground observer sees a light where the radar
target is located, then a jet interceptor is scrambled to intercept
the UFO and the pilot also sees the light and gets a radar lock-on
only to have the UFO almost impudently outdistance him, there is no
simple answer. We have no aircraft on this earth that can at will so
handily outdistance our latest jets.

The Air Force is still actively engaged in investigating UFO
reports, although during the past six months there have been definite
indications that there is a movement afoot to get Project Blue Book
to swing back to the old Project Grudge philosophy of analyzing UFO
reports--write them all off, regardless. But good UFO reports cannot
be written off with such answers as fatigued pilots seeing a balloon
or star; "green" radar operators with _only_ fifteen years'
experience watching temperature inversion caused blips on their
radarscopes; or "a mild form of mass hysteria or war nerves." Using
answers like these, or similar ones, to explain the UFO reports is an
expedient method of getting the percentage of unknowns down to zero,
but