46
THE HYNEK UFO REPORT
would be a crash, but it seemed to swerve off at the last minute. This happened around 4 A.M. Then, after skirting the plane, it took off at a low altitude toward the west . . . . As it was leaving, one of his co-workers came out of the train and he saw it leaving as a "morn ing bright star." Mr. Cherrington was shaken by the experience, and his only reaction was "if something like this has to happen, let it be on someone else's shift !" Air Force evaluation: "Star and planet. Object has char acteristics of astronomical object with distortion due to the atmospheric conditions present and the interpretations of the object's behavior by the witness under these unusual conditions." Well, what unusual conditions? The night was clear, the moon was out (and apparently looking perfectly natural) and no atmospheric distortion. can make a star blank out a plane's lights, have a star appear to skirt a plane, and then take off at a low altitude toward the west. It would have been far better to evaluate this case as a hallucination-but stars!! My intention in citing the preceding examples is not to establish proof of the UFO phenomenon-but to illustrate the lackadaisical and irrt)sponsible manner in which many of the UFO reports were treated by Blue Book. "Get rid of the report quickly, no matter how" seems to have been the operative principle-except in cases when it was ob vious that an airtight case could be made for a misidenti fication; then such cases were given the full treatment and used extensively in Washington "briefings" to demonstrate what a good job Blue Book was doing in proving that there was absolutely nothing substantive to the UFO phenom enon. That way led to praise and promotion. It was fairly obvious to the public that the Air Force was not taking the UFO phenomenon at all seriously; Blue Book's small and relatively low-ranking staff made this abundantly clear. There has been much discussion as to whether Blue Book's get-rid-of-them policy was purpose fully contrived by the Air Force and the Pentagon as a smoke screen, while covert UFO investigations were being carried on at a much higher level. While secret manipula tions behind the closed doors of the Pentagon cannot be