Documents / Official release
Project Blue Book Status Report No. 8, issued by the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and dated 31 December 1952, covers June to October 1952, when 886 reports were received. That is more than in the previous five years combined. It breaks down evaluations by category and summarizes a survey of 44 astronomers and the 29 July 1952 Pentagon press conference. It also covers a new observer questionnaire, cooperation with the Air Defense Command, access to weather balloon tracking data and diffraction grating cameras.
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# UNCLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL Meteors are identified mainly by the observer's description as to size, shape, and maneuvers. In some cases, exceptionally large meteors or fireballs are plotted by observatories and these plots are obtained. ## F. Other This category contains reports that have been proven to be known objects or phenomena, or the descriptions of the reported objects are similar to reports of known objects that do not fall into the above categories. Examples of these are birds, anomalous radar phenomena, bugs, etc. A percentage breakdown of the evaluation of reports is as follows: ## A. June Category No. Reports % Total Unknown 57 38.77 Insufficient Data 23 15.64 Aircraft 14 9.52 Balloons 22 14.96 Astronomical 22 14.96 Other 9 6.12 147 100.00% July Unknown 93 21.04 Insufficient Data 118 26.69 Aircraft 52 11.76 Balloons 107 24.21 Astronomical 57 12.89 Other 15 3.39 442 100.00% August Unknown 34 15.59 Insufficient Data 55 25.23 Aircraft 28 12.84 Balloons 70 32.11 Astronomical 22 10.09 Other 9 4.13 218 100.00%
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 17 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.