Amid the crush of sightings, discussion and activity about UFOs increased, within official circles and beyond. On June 4, Air Force Secretary Finletter publicized his recent UFO briefing, noting that the evidence remained inconclusive but warranted investigation. A few days later, Donald Menzel wrote in
The most serious discussions occurred behind closed doors. In the middle of June, Ruppelt briefed General Samford and his staff. Two navy captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence and (in Ruppelt’s words) “some people I can’t name” also attended. The meeting was tense and contentious. One of Samford’s staff members, a colonel, argued that Blue Book’s investigation was biased against the interplanetary thesis. After this statement, “you could almost hear the colonel add, ‘O.K., so now I’ve said it.’” This started an emotional debate with nothing accomplished. Blue Book was directed simply to “take further steps to obtain positive identification” of UFOs.17
The military encounters continued. On June 18, 1952, a UFO paced a B- 25 in California for thirty minutes. On the nineteenth, at Goose Bay Air Base in Labrador, members of the ground crew saw a strange, red-lighted object approach the field, climb steeply, then disappear; radar crews also tracked the object. On the twenty-first, just before 11 P.M., an unidentified object trespassed, once again, the restricted airspace at the AEC’s Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee. The craft was observed visually, tracked on radar, and pursued by the pilot of an F-47 on combat patrol. During the ensuing aerial dogfight, the UFO evidently attempted to ram the F-47 several times before leaving the area.18
THE JULY CRISIS
From Ruppelt’s perspective, the split in opinions about what to do about UFOs widened every day. One group was “dead serious about the situation.” They wanted (1) a policy of starting from the assumption that UFOs were interplanetary, and (2) a clampdown on the release of information. According to Ruppelt, this group thought that the security classification of the project should go up to Top Secret. He wrote that their enthusiasm “took a firm hold in the Pentagon” and many other agencies throughout the government. By the end of the month, events forced a public confrontation and a behind-the-scenes decision on the matter of UFOs. Small wonder, since ATIC received a whopping 536 reports that month, with unknowns running at 40 percent.19
One of the key UFO sightings of the month, and indeed of the modern era, took place in Tremonton, Utah, on July 2. Delbert C. Newhouse was a warrant officer and veteran naval aviation photographer who owned a 16mm Bell & Howell movie camera. While out driving with his family, he noticed unusual objects in the sky and got out of the vehicle with his camera, which had a telephoto lens. The objects were originally at close range, “large, disc-shaped, and brightly lighted,” and “shaped like two saucers, one inverted on top of the other.” By the time he had the camera ready, they were directly overhead but had receded quite a bit from their original position. He shot about seventy-five seconds’ worth of color film that captured what seemed to be twelve to fourteen shiny points of light maneuvering at high speed. He claimed steadfastly that he held his camera steady.
The film went to ATIC and Blue Book. Ruppelt told Fournet in Washington about it, and Fournet arranged for the original film to be shown to a group of high-ranking intelligence officers. It then arrived at the air force’s photo reconnaissance laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB. A few weeks later, this lab told Ruppelt that “we don’t know what they are, but they aren’t airplanes or balloons, and we don’t think they are birds.” The complete air force investigation of the Utah film lasted for months. Although the analysts tried to identify the objects as something conventional, they were unable to do so, except to suggest “possible birds.”
