CRASH AT CORONA - Stanton Friedman-pages

Page 47 of 242

Page 47 of 242
CRASH AT CORONA - Stanton Friedman-pages

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32 relationship between the technical qualifications and reliabil- ity of the witnesses, and the percentage of unexplained cases. For witnesses rated Poor-to-Doubtful, only 14 percent of the reports couldn't be explained by the Battelle scientists. But for witnesses rated Good-to-Excellent, twice as many—27 percent—couldn't be explained. Clearly, the better the witness, the harder it was to explain a UFO report. Had this instead of irrelevant material been emphasized in the press release, the public might have realized that many UFO reports were still a major mystery to the U.S. Air Force. Now, if there was a report numbered 14, shouldn't there, by all the laws of logic, be thirteen previous reports? Hints of earlier Project Blue Book reports had been floating around for several years, but so little was known about them that it had to be assumed that if they existed at all, they must still be classi- fied. As there was no way to obtain material classified Con- fidential, Secret, Top Secret, and so on, a lot of possibly important information was being held back. Unbeknown to anyone, Project Grudge and Blue Book Re- ports 1 through 12, dated 1951-1953, had been declassified from Confidential and Secret as early as 1960. But the facts of their writing, classification, and eventual declassification had not been announced. Once the situation became known to National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), an effort was begun through the Government Opera- tions Committee of the House of Representatives to override the refusal of the Air Force to release this unclassified material. Thanks to the assistance of Congress, they were pried loose from the Air Force and published by NICAP in 1968. Report 13 is still the subject of rumors and denials. Now, for the very first time, there was proof that the U.S. government had withheld unclassified UFO information from the public. These periodic status reports of Projects Grudge and Blue Book revealed a great deal about the inner workings of the only known official investigation. Moreover, they added considerable weight to a 1958 commercially published book about Project Blue Book by Edward Ruppelt, project director CRASH AT CORONA