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Page 4 of 15 astonished, and eager to find out."(39) Dr. Hynek has an excellent, well-illustrated article on UFOs in a 1982 book which gives a detailed history of the UFO sightings, together with the reports of some well-known people who made them, including President Jimmy Carter while governor of Georgia.(40) Shapes Of UFOs Witnesses have described the shapes of UFOs as anything varying from a sphere to a boomerang. Some have resembled flying saucers with a lid; others a glowing tube; some as semi-spherical with colored apertures; some with reddish-orange glows, or fire-like or sparking discharges. Incredible speed and maneuverabilities not attainable by aircraft of any kind are commonly observed. Many of the books and articles in Appendix H have excellent photographs of these unexplained visitors--photos that have been checked by experts for their authenticity. History Of UFOS For hundreds of years mysterious objects in the sky and strange moving lights have been reported by many people, including the military pilots in World War II who called them foo fighters, ("Where there's Foo, there's Fire"). In the middle of the 1900s flying saucers were increasingly observed in the United States and other countries. Scientists at the University of Colorado hired by the Air Force from 1966 to 1968 to study this type of aerial phenomena could explain most of the UFO reports as a star (Venus), meteor, planet, balloon, rocket, artificial satellite, etc. Sometimes atmospheric conditions, aircraft exhaust trails, or unusual lighting conditions may produce optical illusions that observers thought were UFOs. After investigating more than 12,000 reports, the U.S. Air Force was unable to explain where the unexplained UFOs come from, but apparently concluded that the national security was not threatened by them.(41) The emphasis of the university's team, headed by Edward U. Condon, seemed to be more concerned with the establishment of the emotional stability or instability of those who reported the sightings than with other evidence. Psychiatrists have examined the witnesses who claimed to have encountered UFOs and even been taken aboard their craft, such as the two shipyard workers in Mississippi, and found that they are not unbalanced people.(42) "They're not crackpots. There was definitely something here that was not terrestrial."(43) Dr. J. Allen Hynek agreed, and added. "Where they are coming from and why they are here is a matter of conjecture. but the fact that they were here on this planet is beyond a reasonable doubt."(44) The Air Force. after 20 years of being deluged with UFO sightings and spending millions of dollars on their investigation, decided to drop the inquiry business and turned the project over to a Kensington, Maryland, group called NICAP (National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena). This left NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) with part of the task of trying to run UFO sighting reports, including many by its own Apollo and Skylab astronauts. By 1974 over a score of astronauts saw and photographed UFOs during their flights beyond the earth's atmosphere. Early in the Apollo 11 mission, which culminated in the moon walk, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins reported sightings of what seemed to be a UFO during the first half of their flight to the lunar surface. There were many more sightings by U.S. and Soviet Astronauts. On November 11,1966, Gemini XII astronauts Jim Lovell and Edwin Aldrin said that they saw four UFOs linked together, and on October 12, 1964, three Russian astronauts aboard Voskod reported that they were surrounded by a "formation of fast-moving disc- shaped objects."(45) In addition to NICAP, some of the other organizations that study UFO phenomena are MUFON (Mutual UFO Networks), CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy), GSW (Ground Saucer Watch), CUFOS (the Center for UFO Studies), and APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), an Arizona nonprofit scientific and educational organization, founded in 1952.(46) 4/6/2008 FIREFIGHTERS UFO MANUAL UFO Organizations http://www. greatdreams.com/ufos/firefighters.htm