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By Lloyd Mallan Here are the most unusual UFO sightings of this decade - selected from the files of the Air Force's "Project Blue Book." All are by reliable observers and all are complete with specific details. None can progress in the space sciences - one aspect of atmospheric and space research remains a mystery. Unidentified Flying Objects, commonly called UFOs, continue to be reported ever more frequently even as they continue to defy scientific analysis. Of course the largest number of these sightings have been pinned down and explained as natural phenomena or man-made objects with which the observers A fairly large number of those sightings that cannot be explained would, no doubt, be explainable - if the observers had been able to supply more detailed information about what they actually saw. Of nearly 700 "unknowns," as they are dubbed by the U.S. Air Force people investigating UFOs, the "good unknowns" to date number less than 100 - and I am being very conservative in this estimate. A good unknown is one that has been sighted by a reliable observer who unemotionally notes details that Ever since UFO sightings began on June 24, 1947, when a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw an unexplainable formation of nine saucer-shaped objects flying near Mt. Rainier, Wash., the subject of UFOs has fired the public imagination. It has also been a headache for the personnel of Project Blue Book, the Air Force agency that investigates and tries to explain these enigmatic objects. The Air Force has two main interests in the subject: (1) Are these objects seen in the skies, and occasionally on the ground, hostile in their intent and thereby a threat to the security of the United States? And (2) What new scientific knowledge, if any, may be gained from them? So far, no UFO has demonstrated the faintest threat to national security - and equally no UFO has revealed information that would be of concrete value to science. UFOs remain only as a weird challenge to the the American people. The accusations come in the form of newspaper and magazine articles, books and editorials. The pressure of these accusations has stirred up both Congress and the Department of Defense. The people on Project Blue Book wish that they had never heard of a UFO, for they bear the brunt of the accusations. Because they wanted to prove that they are not hiding anything, they allowed Science if Mechanics to examine their files. Some of the cases in those files were mighty unusual. These pictured an amazing range of objects, varying widely in characteristics and shapes. Not all of them are good unknowns in 2 - The Mysterious 12 be explained by what we know today. As we enter the second half of this decade - a decade that has thus far seen almost unbelievably rapid were not familiar. can be used to describe the UFO. scientific imagination. Yet each time a new UFO is sighted, the Air Force is accused of hiding the facts about that UFO from