ideas, pros and cons, and insinuations that some people were imitating ostriches to keep from facing the truth followed.
The outcome of the meeting was a directive to take further steps to obtain positive identification of the UFO’s. Our original idea of attempting to get several separate reports from one sighting so we could use triangulation to measure speed, altitude, and size wasn’t working out. We had given the idea enough publicity, but reports where triangulation could be used were few and far between. Mr. or Mrs. Average Citizen just doesn’t look up at the sky unless he or she sees a flash of light or hears a sound. Then even if he or she does look up and sees a UFO, it is very seldom that the report ever gets to Project Blue Book. I think that it would be safe to say that Blue Book only heard about 10 per cent of the UFO’s that were seen in the United States.
After the meeting I went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to some people about how to get better UFO data. We brought back the idea of using an extremely long focal-length camera equipped with a diffraction grating.
The cameras would be placed at various locations throughout the United States where UFO’s were most frequently seen. We hoped that photos of the UFO’s taken through the diffraction gratings would give us some proof one way or the other.
The diffraction gratings we planned to use over the lenses of the cameras were the same thing as prisms; they would split up the light from the UFO into its component parts so that we could study it and determine whether it was a meteor, an airplane, or balloon reflecting sunlight, etc. Or we might be able to prove that the photographed UFO was a craft completely foreign to our knowledge.
A red-hot, A-1 priority was placed on the camera project, and a section at ATIC that developed special equipment took over the job of obtaining the cameras, or, if necessary, having them designed and built.
But the UFO’s weren’t waiting around till they could be photographed. Every day the tempo and confusion were increasing a little more.
By the end of June it was very noticeable that most of the
