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FBI file 62-HQ-83894, section 7

Department of War · 205 pages · text from the file's own layer

This section of FBI file 62-HQ-83894 collects Bureau correspondence and memoranda on flying saucers from 1952 to 1954. It holds letters from the public, which J. Edgar Hoover forwarded to the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, and a 1952 teletype about a saucer-shaped light over the Savannah River Plant. It also includes an FBI Laboratory examination of the burned cap of scoutmaster D. S. DesVergers, which found no identifying residue, and instructions to field offices to refer disc reports to the Air Force.

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UNION- NATIONAL, DIC. • JAMESTOWN, N. v..,,
Isaw? " Major ·e ~ ~gs, who was
then the chief - 3<1. 1ficer between
, v r ight Field and tl. 1igh command
in \ Vashington, said to me one day
shortly after Project Saucer had pre
sumably become a thing of the past.
" It would be different if flying sau
cers were known to exist. Then we
could have collected evidence indi
cating the degrees of probability that
such things were sighted and the reaso11
for their appearance at a given place.
But it is impossible to prove, logically
and with finality, a double negative
that is, that there arc no flying saucers
and that people have not seen flying sau
cers. The best we could do under the
cir cumstances was to deduce, first, from
the fact that it had not been proved, that
saucers had been seen and, second,
from the fact that r easonable theories
could be advanced to explain away all
the re ports of seeing them, that probably
nobody had seen them at all. The
fewer the theoretical explanations and
the less plausible they were, the more
reason there was fo r suspecting people
had seen saucers." The Major shook
his head, and continued, " I t's a difficult
concept to grasp, but so was the job we
were tackling."
I asked Major Boggs whether ther e
was any way to account for the epidemic
of reports of strange celestial objects.
"Of course there is," he replied. "If
you look up at the sky long enough, you
can almost always make out something
there that appears strange. And more
people are looking up now than ever
before. Kids don't count freight cars
any more; they count airplanes. People
who were trained in air observation
during the war have gone right on
observing. Also, the public hasn't for
gotten that the atomic bomb was kept
secret from it for three years. T his
time, people want to know what's cook-
ing, so they look up." Major Boggs
sighed . " T ime was when people used
to make a wish if they saw a shoot
ing star. Now they telephone the Air
Force."
Major Boggs and I pondered t his
unromantic age in silence for a moment.
T hen he returned briskly to the prob
lems that had confronted the investi
gators. "The one tangible thing we had
to work on was the fact that the sky is
full of things," he said. "I can't even
come close to estimating the number of
commer cial and m ilitary aircraft up
there a t any given moment. T hen, there
are more than fi ve hundred outfi ts of
one kind or another that release balloons
from time to time. These range from
simple weather balloons, nr • -~er than
page 67. 68

Cases discussed

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Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.