FBI file: UFO, UFO Part 12

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

holding one in my ow he said. The rancher forwar find to Wright Field, where it w identified as a remnant of one of the indiary balloons the hopeful Japanese dispatched across the Pacific during the war in an effort to start forest fires.

Even pictures taken of supposed saucers failed to impress the experts. There was the case of a man in Phoenix, Arizona, who spotted a flat gray object spiralling up and down in the sky at a speed that he estimated at between four and five hundred miles an hour. He snapped two pictures of it with his Brownie. Prints were rushed to Project Saucer, and Dr. Irving Langmuir, the physicist and a Nobel Prize winner, was asked to study them. The distinguished scientist learned that a thunderstorm had occurred just before the picture-taking, and concluded that he was looking at a couple of rather poor shots of a piece of paper being buffeted by the wind.

AS time went on and the skies, apparently, continued to teem with flying saucers, the generals in the Pentagon, warming to their task, decided to enlarge the scope of the investigation. Commanders of all Air Force installations in the country were ordered to assign Intelligence officers to look into sightings reported in their areas. The officers were instructed to solicit the assistance of municipal police officials, who might be familiar with the personalities of the saucer observers. The F.B.I. was also called upon for assistance, and assigned agents to help interview people who reported that they had seen discs. The agents used a standard questionnaire, drawn up by Air Force Intelligence, which called for such information as the saucer's size, speed, color, and maneuvers. The information was usually transmitted to Wright Field, but some stories were so obviously false and some "evidence" so obviously trifling that the F.B.I. men didn't even bother to fill out the questionnaire. In Seattle, for instance, an alarmed woman called the police to inform them that a flaming disc had landed on her roof. The object turned out to be a hollow, drum-shaped affair made of plywood, with "USSR" crudely daubed on it in paint. An F.B.I. man found that a turpentine-soaked cloth had caused the flame. A practical joke, he decided. A farmer near Danforth, Illinois, reported that a saucer had crash-landed in one of his fields and burned up a patch of weeds. The F.B.I.