Only time will tell.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

And They’re Still Flying

[Transcriber’s Note:  The following three chapters were added to the second edition text in 1960.]

Four years have passed since the first seventeen chapters of this book were written.  During this period hundreds of unidentified flying objects have been seen and reported to the Air Force.  Pilots, with thousands of hours of flying time are still reporting them; radar operators, experts in their field, are still tracking them; and crews on the missile test ranges are photographing them.

UFO’s are not just a fad.

The Air Force’s Project Blue Book is still very active.  Not a week passes that one of the many teams of its nation wide investigation net is not in the field investigating a new UFO report.

To pick up the history of the UFO the best place to start is Cincinnati, Ohio, in the late summer of 1955.  For some unknown reason, one of those mysterious factors of the UFO, reports from this Hamilton County city suddenly began to pick up.  Mass hysteria, the old crutch, wasn’t a factor because neither the press, the radio nor TV was even mentioning the words “flying saucer.”

The reports weren’t much in terms of quality.  Some lady would see a “bobbing white light”; or a man, putting his car away, would see a “star jump.”  These reports, usually passed on to the Air Force through the Air Defense Command’s Ground Observer Corps, merely went on the UFO plotting board as a statistic.

But before long, in a matter of a week or two, the mass of reports began to draw some official attention because the Ground Observer Corps spotters themselves began to make UFO reports.  At times during the middle of August the telephone lines from the GOC observation posts in Hamilton County (greater Cincinnati) to the filter center in Columbus would be jammed.  Now, even the most cynical Air Force types were be-grudgingly raising their eyebrows.  These GOC observers were about as close to “experts” as you can get.  Many had spent hundreds of hours scanning the skies since the GOC went into the operation in 1952 to close the gaps in our radar net.  Many held awards for meritorious service.  They weren’t crackpots.

But still the cynics held out.  This was really nothing new.  The Project Blue Book files were full of similar incidents.  In 1947 there had been a rash of reports from the Pacific Northwest; in 1948 there had been a similar outbreak at Edwards Air Force Base, the supersecret test center in the Mojave Desert of California; in 1949 the sightings centered in the midwest.  None had panned out to be anything.

Then came the clincher.