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37 membership fees, and its ability to pressure the government. Its once busy downtown Washington office was closed to per- mit construction of a station of the new Metro subway system, and its shrinking operations were relocated in a suburb, out of sight. For several years so little was heard about UFOs that it was as if they had never existed in the first place. Many once- confident UFO activists could hardly be blamed for wondering if they really had been as gullible as the Air Force had so often implied. All but the largest of the civilian groups vanished, and the others shrank into impotence. Sources of information rap- idly dried up. If UFOs were still being seen, it was all but impossible to find out anything about them. Maybe they had finally lost interest in human affairs and gone home. When the Air Force closed Project Blue Book, its position on the controversial matter was the same as it had been for many years, and would remain for many more: (1) no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and eval- uated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; (2) there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED rep- resent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and (3) there has been no evidence indicating that sightings catego- rized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles. 1. No threat to national security? Certainly not from cases in the Project Blue Book files. But as for other cases, they would be buried deep in secure filing cabinets and computer data- bases and could not be referred to in unclassified documents. The mere existence of procedures to deal with reports having national security implications raises a lot of questions the government refuses to address. THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS The final word? Not quite! The loopholes are enormous: