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31 the memo and to all contemporary and subsequent official statements: "... the Air Force has made very little progress in learning what the phenomena or objects are and what causes them." After five years of trying! Had this not remained secret for almost a third of a century after it was written, the stature of the government's overt UFO investigation might not have seemed quite so impressive. In 1955 the Air Force issued a thick document called Blue Book Special Report 14, a statistical analysis of all the reports received for its first six years. Prepared by the private and respected Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and reportedly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, it was a civilian study of the official data. Of 2,199 cases considered through the end of 1952, the Air Force's own people had determined that 290 of them (13 per- cent) could not be explained. The independent Battelle scien- tists, however, classified 434 (20 percent) as unexplained, and that was boosted to 22 percent when the cases lacking suf- ficient detail for analysis were eliminated. Either way, a lot of UFO reports remained without satisfactory explanation, de- spite implications to the contrary in the press release that accompanied the report when it was revealed to the public in October 1955. "No evidence of the existence of the popularly-termed 'fly- ing saucers' was found." The press release stressed the al- legedly improved methods and procedures of early 1955 (a time period having absolutely no connection with Special Report 14). Air Force Secretary Donald Quarles was quoted: "I feel certain that even the unknown three percent [for 1955, not 1947-1952]) could have been explained as conventional phe- nomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been available." This was in direct contradiction of the way sightings had always been classified, "insufficient data" cases being in their own category and completely separate from the "unknowns." Perhaps the most telling revelation of the Battelle indepen- dent analysis can be found in a set of pie charts illustrating the THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS