Air Force Project Blue Book Special Report 14 (Hynek's annotated copy)

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

[4] How did the author(s) arrive at the conclusion, given at the end of the first full paragraph on orig. page 93, that "...it is still impossible to develop a picture of what a 'flying saucer' is."?

Persons trained in science and engineering, and those educated in the fields of law, accounting, business, medecine, or other disciplines in which logical thinking is a requisite, should be able to unravel the utter nonsense contained in the section of the report called "The 'Flying Saucer' Model", on orig. pages 76--94. It should be sufficient to call attention to several facts:

(a) The author(s) found only twelve cases reported in enough detail to merit consideration. Anyone who has followed the subject knows of many other cases of detailed sightings which would serve as well, or better, than the dozen selected for the Blue Book analysis.

(b) In discussing these twelve detailed cases, the report omits details such as the names of the localities and other identifying information which there is absolutely no reason to withhold. The reason for this may be to try to hinder readers who might want to compare other versions of those same cases with the versions presented by the report.

For instance, Case I on page 78(orig.) is apparently Cases 151 and 152 of the August, 1949, Project GRUDGE Report (Report No. 102-AC, 49/15- 100, HQ, Air Materiel Command, Wright Field). The location is Indiana- polis. Case II took place in Flint, Mich. Case III is from Sioux City, Iowa, and is reported as Case No. 7 in the Life Magazine article of April 7, 1952. Case V is the Chiles-Whitted case, from Montgomery, Alabama, which is written up in many books.

(c) The sketches of the objects in the Report have a certain studied awkwardness about them, as if the artist had been instructed to make the objects look as different as possible and as queer as possible. For example, the sketch of Case III resembles two frankfurters lying one across the other. The artist is certainly a skilled draftsman; the shading very clearly shows the cylindrical shapes of the frankfurters. Yet the description given by the pilots in Case III specifies "an airplane with a cigar-shaped body and straight wings". This sketch is absurd as an illustration of that. Likewise, the strange white markings or openings on the Case IX sketches have no relation to the accompanying text.

(d) The failure to place the sketches of Case VI and Case VIII on the same page hides a very remarkable resemblance.

(e) The key to the situation is found in the extra conditions thrown in at the middle of page 91 (orig.). Presumably all twelve cases had fulfilled such conditions or they would not have survived the weeding-out process. (See p. 77, orig.). The prize example is paragraph (6) on page 92. By throwing Case VI out at this point, the author(s) were then able to throw out Case VIII in par.(8), since the match between these two sketches had been lost by eliminating Case VI. Likewise, Case III was eliminated because Case II had been thrown out.