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zations and individuals who have tried to keep tabs on the sightings. When I first decided to look into these matters in March 1966, I subscribed to several newspaper clipping services, and I was stunned by the results. I often received as many as 150 clippings for a single day! My immediate reaction, of course, was one of disbelief. I thought that all of the newspapers in the country had thrown objectivity out the window and were participating in some kind of gigantic put-on. It seemed impossible that so many unidentifiable things were flying around our sacred skies without being seriously noticed by both the military and the scientific community. My firsttask, therefore, was to determine just how reliable all of these reports were. I began by placing frequent long-distance calls to the reporters and editors of some of the newspapers that seemed to be carrying UFO stories week after week. Not only did they sound like reasonable people, but they all assured me that they were only publishing the more interesting or best-validated stories that were being reported to them. Many were concentrating only on those sightings reported by police officers and local officials. It quickly became clear that literally thousands of sightings were being reported by ordinary citizens but were going completely unpublished. The published sightings represented only a fraction of the whole! I also called many of the witnesses in the published accounts and learned, to my further dismay, that the newspaper stories had only outlined a part of their total experiences. Some of them claimed the objects had pursued their cars, had landed briefly beside the road near them, or had even reappeared later over their homes. Innumerable witnesses complained that their eyes had become red and swollen after their sighting and had remained that way for days afterward. Others said they had experienced peculiar tingling sensations or waves of heat as the objects passed over. I must admit that I experienced an emotional reaction to all of this at first, trying to convince myself that the phenomenon was more hysterical in nature than physical, but the more I heard the more I was forced to realize that all of these people were coming up with the same incredible details. It became apparent that the only way to properly investigate this situation was to travel to the various flap areas personally and interview the witnesses in depth, applying the standard journalistic techniques that I had learned from being a reporter and writer for two long decades. So 14 / Operation Trojan Horse Reliability of Reports