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30 mysterious things flying over some of the most sensitive build- ings in the country. There was absolutely no science to back up General Sam- ford's theory, but this was known only to a few scientists who had looked into the matter... and they kept quiet. Many years later, an official Air Force scientific report demolished the "temperature inversion" explanation for UFOs, but it was not publicized and thus had no impact. On the same day the Air Force held its big press conference the Central Intelligence Agency began a series of hush-hush meetings to deal with its concern that a flood of UFO reports could clog the nation's communications channels and be used by some enemy as a smoke screen to conceal an attack. This led to the January 1953 meeting of a select group of scientists under chairman H. P. Robertson that spent several hours study- ing UFO case files provided by the Air Force. It then announced (in great secrecy, of course) that they showed no evidence of being a threat to national security or of being extraterrestrial spacecraft. The CIA recommended the situation be defused by removing much of the mystery. Instead, Project Blue Book adopted an even more restrictive policy on public information and soon reduced its contact with the press and the American people to an annual report listing the percentages of sightings explained as balloons, satellites, and the like while stressing the lack of evidence that UFOs were anything more than mistakes. But while the statistics supported the Air Force's claims of increasing effectiveness, more and more case files were becoming public knowledge and illustrating the serious ineptitude of Project Blue Book. On July 31, 1952, just two days after the Air Force press conference that paraded the supposed efficiency of Project Blue Book in explaining UFOs, a memorandum was prepared on the subject by Brig. Gen. Alfred R. Maxwell of the Research and Development Board. Until recently it was classified Security Information Confidential. While it generally supported the official position that UFO reports contain no information of value, one statement stands out in stark contrast to the rest of CRASH AT CORONA