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Updated: September 21, 2025
From our studies, we estimated that ATIC received reports of only 10 per cent of the UFO sightings that were made in the United States, therefore in five and a half years something like 44,000 UFO sightings had been made. The actual breakdown was like this: Balloons.....................18.51% Known 1.57 Probable 4.99 Possible 11.95 18.51 Aircraft.....................11.76%
Ginna arrived and the ATIC UFO "expert" talked to him. Ginna later told me about the meeting. He had a long list of questions about reports that had been made over the past four years and every time he asked a question, the "expert" would go tearing out of the room to try to find the file that had the answer.
"And who released this big report, anyway?" another person added, picking up a copy of the Grudge Report and slamming it back down on the table. Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten came back to ATIC with orders to set up a new project and report back to General Cabell when it was ready to go.
We collected all of these reports under the one title because there appeared to be a tie- in between them. The first word of the sightings reached ATIC late in September 1951, when the mail girl dropped letters into my "in" basket.
In the spring of 1950 this changed, however, and the airline pilots began to make more and more reports good reports. The reports went to ATIC but they didn't receive much attention. In a few instances there was a semblance of an investigation but it was halfhearted. The reports reached the newspapers too, and here they received a great deal more attention.
Either case called for a serious, secrecy-shrouded project. Only top people at ATIC were assigned to Project Sign. Although a formal project for UFO investigation wasn't set up until September 1947, the Air Force had been vitally interested in UFO reports ever since June 24, 1947, the day Kenneth Arnold made the original UFO report.
I turned the incident folder over to the electronics specialists at ATIC. They made the analysis and determined that the targets were caused by weather, although it was a borderline case. They further surmised that since the targets had been picked up on two radars, if I checked I'd find out that the two targets looked different on the two radarscopes.
Mr. or Mrs. Average Citizen just doesn't look up at the sky unless he or she sees a flash of light or hears a sound. After the meeting I went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to some people about how to get better UFO data. We brought back the idea of using an extremely long focal-length camera equipped with a diffraction grating.
A red-hot, A-l priority was placed on the camera project, and a section at ATIC that developed special equipment took over the job of obtaining the cameras, or, if necessary, having them designed and built. But the UFO's weren't waiting around till they could be photographed. Every day the tempo and confusion were increasing a little more.
When no orders were forthcoming, they took this to mean that the military had no interest in the UFO's. But before long this placid attitude changed, and changed drastically. Classified orders came down to investigate all UFO sightings. Get every detail and send it direct to ATIC at Wright Field. The order carried no explanation as to why the information was wanted.
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