Air War with UFOs?
[Revealed Details Very Nearly Lost To All History!]
During the Project Blue Book era, when witnesses had a UFO sighting and wanted to report it, officially, they would be directed to contact, believe it or not, the USAF! In turn, they would receive an 8-page "Tentative Observers Questionnaire" with several questions to fill out and return.
When The Air Force received the TOQ, they would review it, and in most cases, would record the sighting in a "PROJECT 10073 WORKSHEET" or some other form of documentation. This would be appended to and would then accompany the Blue Book questionnaire for its filing.
Finally, the UFO sighting would be evaluated in an official USAF "PROJECT 10073 RECORD CARD." These original "Project Blue Book" documents were classified and stored away in the Air Force archives. They were unavailable to the public.
The files were later declassified only in 1969 when the Project Blue Book initiative was closed. These documents were then photographed and processed to degrading microfilm.
Later in the mid-1970s, the United States National Archives in Washington, D.C. became the holder of the Blue Book microfilms. They were made available to the public... Yet, there were changes!
The documents were not in their original state! All the documents contained in these microfilm reels, the reader discovers, were reproduced copies and had also been ruinously redacted. The eyewitnesses' names, most of their pertinent personal informations, and other informations were blacked out. Further, since these documents were copies and not in their original state, they had become severely faded by the time they were copied to film. This made many of them barely legible.
When illustrator Frank Feschino, Jr. obtained the Project Blue Book microfilm reel for the September 12, 1952 UFO sightings, he was shocked to discover that most of the documents were so faded that dozens of the pages were only very barely understandable. Some of the most vitally important information in these faded documents, which by now couldn't be easily (or at all!) read, was the handwritten information filled out in the aforementioned questionnaire by the actual witnesses. Feschino cleverly xeroxed all the microfilm pages and blew them up utilizing his art training and equipment skills. These skills included his honed talents regarding calligraphy.
Feschino had a key school-trained eye and spent countless hours over many years refurbishing these documents to their new legibility. He studied handwriting analysis books and enlarged many of the documents, as was said, and then, word by word, he began to decipher them, re-inking them back to their original state.
One such key document in the Project Blue Book records, shown above, was the report of a Sept. 12 UFO officially evaluated as the "meteor of 12 Sep." We've heard about that mythical bolus, before!
This report was only one of the many UFOs sighted over, and near, the Washington, D.C. area during the September 12, 1952 flap that night... as we have pointed out, exhaustively, earlier on this site. The witness, a man from "District Heights, Maryland" explained his UFO sighting in his own "Tentative Observers Questionnaire." According to the witness, the object he saw was about the size of an "automobile" and the length of his observation was, "11 or 12 seconds." 11 or 12 seconds... time that out... it's a long time for a meteor... too long.
This is from page 8 section "30" of that Project Blue Book eyewitness "Tentative Observers Questionnaire." In the photo above, the spiral binder of documents displays the near unreadable raw faded copy as it was printed directly from the September 12, 1952 microfilm. Feschino enlarged this document to 2x3 feet and carefully analyzed the writer's handwriting. He studied his writing style, the formation, and the characteristics of his letters. He studied the flow of words used in each sentence. Then, after several hours of review, Feschino was finally able to reconstruct and re-ink its entire contents! He then scaled the document back down to its original size.
The document that Frank re-inked is on the clipboard. It can now be easily read many years after the witness wrote it back in 1952. Note that the eyewitnesses' name was blacked out by the Air Force. This UFO sighting, said to be a meteor by the Air Force, occurred over District Heights, Maryland at 7:00 pm EST. In part, the most pertinent information that the witness wrote here in section "30" gives the following details of his sighting:
"I don't know what it was I saw and will insist on what it was NOT, I have seen meteors, and the newspapers will have a hard time telling me I was looking at a meteor on 9/12 [September 12]—maybe it sounds good to persons who didn't see the object—this THING was being flown...In summation, this may sound as though I am inferring some fraud in the reports given to the public, perhaps responsible parties believe they are true and the best information available, but did they see the thing on 9/12? [Name blacked out]"
In closing, I would like to refer to another question in the questionnaire that was answered by the witness in a straightforward manner. The question was, "In your opinion what do you think the object was and what might have caused it?"
Here, reader, I would have loved to have seen Bluebook Chief Captain Ed Ruppelt's facial expression when he read this witness's answer. The eyewitness wrote,
"This is your job. I have seen many meteors. This was not one—much too large. It was not an image or reflection... It didn't fall toward the earth."
Such was so...
