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

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

While working in Washington in 1952, I had seen classified photos of a certain Navy guided missile which disproved (to me, at least) the Air Force denials that the U.S. had no devices which looked like some of the saucers reported by the public. Major Fournet stated that he knew nothing about this missile, and I sincerely believe that he really didn't! Of such stuff are U.S.A.F. saucer investigators deprived!

While trying to clear a proposed article reporting this sad state of affairs, I was paid a visit by a team of three men, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, and the Inspector of Naval Materiel. These three men assured themselves that I had seen the missile photos legitimately in the course of my work, and that I had not compromised security procedures in handling my proposed release. (The O.N. I. man wore black, incidentally, for the information of those readers who have heard about saucer researchers being silenced after a visit from "three men in black.") A letter from Senator Flanders (p. A8) was a reply to my correspondence to Congress about this missile and the U.F.O.'s.

In letters to the Secretarv of Defense and others in 1953, I pointed out that the Air Force's attitude of ridiculing and operationally ignoring all saucer sightings could allow an enemy to send aircraft or missiles through our defenses easily, merely by putting enough flashing lights on them to cause them to be reported as "flying saucers". (I personally verified that this would be possible, by working as a volunteer in the White Plains Filter Center of the Ground Observer Corps, and observing the treatment accorded to reports of strange objects.)

Perhaps as a result of such arguments, the Air Force revised its regulation AFR 200-2 in August 1954, pointing out that saucer reports should be taken seriously, just in case... The Air Force also stopped denying that saucers might be American devices, by dropping from its 1954 (and later) press releases the denial paragraph which it had used up through 1953. (Compare the bracketed paragraphs in the press releases reproduced on pages A10, A14, and A17.) I then wrote and got cleared the letter shown on p. A19, pointing out the new position taken by the Air Force.

The 1953 release about the "Hell Roarer" flare (p. A20) shows a typical cause of some flying saucer reports, and furthermore shows how legitimate secret military activities have led to flying saucer reports. These usually receive immediate perfunctory denials that U.S. activities or aircraft had had anything to do with causing the reports. Such denials are properly justified because of the secret nature of the activities at the time. The later admissions (as in the p. A20 press release, for example) tend not to catch up with the original denials, so that such events get established in the saucer literature as "authentic" cases. (See my article "ECM + CIA = UFO" in the March-April 1960 issue of Flying Saucer Review (London, England).)