Major Dewey Fournet, Blue Book’s liaison officer in the Pentagon, and if Dewey didn’t have the answer, Al had permission to call me.
This arrangement worked out fine because Al Chop had been through previous UFO publicity battles when he was in the Office of Public Information at Wright Field.
The interest in the UFO’s that was shown by the press in May was surpassed only by the interest of the Pentagon. Starting in May, I gave on the average of one briefing in Washington every two weeks, and there was always a full house. From the tone of the official comments to the public about UFO’s, it would indicate that there wasn’t a great deal of interest, but nothing could be further from the truth. People say a lot of things behind a door bearing a sign that reads “Secret Briefing in Progress.”
After one of the briefings a colonel (who is now a brigadier general) presented a plan that called for using several flights of F-94C jet interceptors for the specific purpose of trying to get some good photographs of UFO’s. The flight that he proposed would be an operational unit with six aircraft—two would be on constant alert. The F-94Cs, then the hottest operational jet we had, would be stripped of all combat gear to give them peak performance, and they would carry a special camera in the nose. The squadrons would be located at places in the United States where UFO’s were most frequently seen.
The plan progressed to the point of estimating how soon enough airplanes for two flights could be stripped, how soon special cameras could be built, and whether or not two specific Air Force bases in the U.S. could support the units.
Finally the colonel’s plan was shelved, but not because he was considered to be crazy. After considerable study and debate at high command level, it was decided that twelve F-94C’s couldn’t be spared for the job and it would have been ineffective to use fewer airplanes.
The consideration that the colonel’s plan received was an indication of how some of the military people felt about the importance of finding out exactly what the UFO’s really were. And in the discussions the words “interplanetary craft” came up more than once.
Requests for briefings came even from the highest figure in
