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 through October 1952, when 886 reports were received, more than in the previous five years combined. It breaks down evaluations by category, summarizes a consultant astronomer's interviews with 44 astronomers, and notes General Samford's 29 July press conference. It also describes the statistical analysis, the new observer questionnaire, Videon diffraction cameras and weather balloon tracking.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# UNCLASSIFIED # CONFIDENTIAL STATUS OF PROJECT BLUE BOOK ## I. OVERALL STATUS The period since the last status report of this project was published (Project Blue Book Status Report #7, 31 May 1952) has produced a volume of reports exceeding the total number of reports received in the period 1947 to 31 Dec 51. For the month of Jul 52, the total was over 440 reports. During the period 1 Jun 52 to 31 Oct 52, the period covered by this status report, 886 reports have been received, evaluated, cross-indexed and filed. This total of 886 represents 149 more reports than had been received during the previous five-year period this project has been in existence. It should be noted that these reports are those coming through official channels to ATIC and do not include the approximately 800 letters received from the public during this period. A noticeable increase in reports started in Jun 52 and reached a peak on 28 Jul 52 when 43 reports were received (see Appendix I). Much of the increased volume of reports can be accredited to the widespread publicity given by Life, Time, Look and many other magazines and newspapers. One noticeable characteristic of the reports is that in general the quality has improved, a factor which resulted from the distribution of Air Force Letter 200-5, Subject: "Reporting of Unidentified Flying Objects", and to widespread briefings given by Project Blue Book briefing teams. In Jul 52 the workload of project personnel had risen to the point that the number of personnel was increased to a total of four officers, two airmen, and two secretaries. For a period of 45 days, a weather officer was on TDY to the project. All reports received were screened and evaluated as soon as possible after they were received. A breakdown as to the evaluations of the reports is given below. The categories used in the evaluation of reports are as follows: ## A. Unknown These are reports that contain relatively enough data to evaluate, but cannot be associated with any known phenomenon or object. There is a possibility that some of these reported objects or phenomena in this category could be identified if more background data on balloon tracks, aircraft movements, etc., were available. ## B. Insufficient Data This category represents reports which do not contain enough data to evaluate. A great many of the cases are due to poor reporting on the
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.