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sightings make the popular extraterrestrial (interplanetary) hypothesis completely untenable. These important negative factors will also be explored in depth further on. Apparently the U.S. Air Force intelligence teams realized early in the game (1947-49) that it would be logistically impossible for any foreign power, or even any extraterrestrial source, to maintain such a huge force of flying machines in the Western Hemisphere without suffering an accident that would expose the whole operation, or without producing patterns which would reveal their bases. There was never any real question about the reliability of the witnesses. Pilots, top military men, and whole crews of ships had seen unidentified flying objects during World War II and had submitted excellent technical reports to military intelligence. The real problem remained: What had these people seen? The general behavior of the objects clearly indicated that they were paraphysical (i.e., not composed of solid matter). They were clocked at incredible speeds within the atmosphere but did not produce sonic booms. They performed impossible maneuvers that defied the laws of inertia. They appeared and disappeared suddenly, like ghosts. Because there was no way in which their paraphysicality could be supported and explained scientifically, the ‘Air Force specialists were obliged to settle upon an alternate hypothesis that could be accepted by the public and the scientific community. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and AF consultant, suggested the “‘natural phenomena” explanation after finding they could successfully fit most of the sighting descriptions into explanations of meteors, swamp gas, weather balloons and the like, to everyone’s satisfaction—except the original witnesses. This left them with only a small residue of inexplicable “hard” sightings, which they shelved with a shrug. Captain Edward Ruppelt, head of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book in the early 1950s, wrote a book, Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, in which he freely discussed all of this. That book, published in 1956, still stands as the best standard reference on the subject. The explosion of public interest in the UFO phenomenon in 1947 attracted many highly qualified professional scientists, researchers and authors, Working independently, they quietly assessed the incoming evidence and slowly evolved complex theories that accounted for the paraphysicality of the objects. Unfortunately for them, the idea of extra- terrestrial visitants had very strong emotional appeal, and the many iunateur enthusiasts who were drawn to the subject quickly accepted the LT’ hypothesis on the strength of superficial, circumstantial evidence and 32 / Operation Trojan Horse