Tremonton, Utah, UFO Color Film of July 2, 1952:

Early Beginning

I made my beginning analysis of unconventional object maneuvers in the 1950's. This work was no doubt stimulated by my sighting of unconventional objects on July 16, 1952. My sighting was made at the peak of the flap for that year, tightly sandwiched between the July 14 Pan American Airways sighting in my own neighborhood and the great Washington D.C. flap on July 19, 1952. My sighting was investigated by Project Blue Book, classified as unknown, and given first public mention by Major Edward Ruppelt on pages 157-58 in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

My background of flight experiments with rocket-supported platforms was pertinent to the understanding of the control of unconventional objects, that is, to the understanding of how they maneuver. It enabled me to correlate their tilt-to-control maneuvers fifteen years before that idea came to a member of the Condon Project. In his book, Dr. David Saunders says, "...information might be gleaned from a careful analysis of the relation (if any) between attitude changes (tilting) of a single UFO and changes in its direction, or speed of flight. Questions along these lines were a part of my UFO reporting questionnaire that the project never got around to using" (p. 232).

While I did not invent the idea of flying platforms, I built the first ones capable of flight testing and capable of testing flight maneuvers. They were of the type which tilt-to-control, the thrust remaining coincident with the axis of symmetry. I did not realize until after I had experienced the superb controllability of my device that unconventional objects might be controlled on the same principles. If this thought was correct, I had a nearly perfect piece of equipment for simulating their maneuvers. Another encouraging aspect was that saucer UFO's even looked like a flying platform.

I was soon doing the pendulum-rock and falling leaf, the sudden reversals, banking-to-turn, and the silver-dollar wobble, surely the first UFO maneuver flight simulations. I did them as much because they came naturally and I enjoyed doing them, as for any other reason. Although some data about some of them, such as the falling leaf and sudden reversals, was common even then, data about others, such as the bank-to-turn, was in short supply and the experiments were almost ahead of the data. But as the data rolled in through the 1950's, the correctness of the UFO maneuver simulations became more and more evident. By the time I saw the Tremonton, Utah, movies of maneuvering disks in slow and stop motion, in which I could make out the circular planforms and the edge-on fadeouts as well as the elliptic in-between on banking turns, I was totally convinced that the analysis of UFO maneuvers as presented in Section XI is the correct one.

I was prevented from making any pronouncements about this application of my work by official National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) policy. That policy was that flying saucers are nonexistent. The NACA Director, Dr. Hugh L. Dryden, made a public pronouncement to that effect at about that time, and I had been instructed by my superior in official channels that my name could not be used in connection with my sighting or in any way that would implicate the NACA with these objects. NACA research officials were all scientists with management training in which the necessity for unambiguous policy had been emphasized. Clearly, I was destined to remain as unidentified as the flying objects. When the name of the organization was changed from NACA to NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the same officials remained in charge, and one cold notice no change in policy. The only difference was that individuals were going into space; when astronauts sighted unknowns in space, a grounded official couldn't rationally contradict them. But they could shut them off the air.