CHAPTER ONE
Project Blue Book
and the UFO Story
In the summer of 1952 a United States Air Force F-86 jet interceptor shot at a flying saucer.
This fact, like so many others that make up the full flying saucer story, has never before been told.
I know the full story about flying saucers and I know that it has never before been told because I organized and was chief of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, the special project set up to investi¬ gate and analyze unidentified flying object, or UFO, reports. (UFO is the official term that I created to replace the words “flying saucers.”)
There is a fighter base in the United States which I used to visit frequently because, during 1951, 1952, and 1953, it got more than its share of good UFO reports.
The commanding officer of the fighter group, a full colonel and command pilot, believed that UFO’s were real. The colonel believed in UFO’s because he had a lot of faith in his pilots—and they had chased UFO’s in their F-86’s. He had seen UFO’s on the scopes of his radar sets, and he knew radar.
The colonel’s intelligence officer, a captain, didn’t exactly believe that UFO’s were real, but he did think that they warranted careful investigation. The logic the intelligence officer Used in investigating UFO reports—and in getting answers to many of them—made me wish many times that he worked for me on Project Blue Book.
One day the intelligence officer called me at my base in Dayton, Ohio. He wanted to know if I was planning to make a trip his way
