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stated in a letter addressed to NASA's Lieutenant General Duward L. Crow, "I sincerely hope that you are successful in preventing a reopening of UFO investigations." [11] There is no record to indicate to what extent this or any other pressure from the Air Force influenced developments within NASA in response to Frank Press's request on behalf of Carter. Some NASA employees had reservations as well. After a fairly lengthy series of letters, memos, and inquiries made through various levels of the hierarchical NASA bureaucracy, the agency turned down the president of the United States in December 1977— without giving a project officer a chance to review the accumulated data. Frosch said that NASA needed "bona fide physical evidence from credible sources ... tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis" in order to do so. Due to the absence of such evidence, he said, "we have not been able to devise a sound scientific procedure for investigating these phenomena." Therefore, he proposed that no steps be taken to "establish a research activity in this area or to convene a a a: .urand symposium on this subject." [12] Dr. Richard C Henry, a prominent professor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University, was then deputy director of NASA's Astrophysics Division and involved in the decision-making process. In a 1988 published essay, Henry takes issue with Frosch's claim of "an absence of tangible or physical evidence." He says there was an abundance of relevant evidence at the time, a situation that he, as head of the Astrophysics Division, was ce certainly aware of. Henry says Frosch's statement denying the existence of a sound scientific protocol was simply false. "The National Academy of Sciences endorsed the Condon study of UFOs, and specifically endorsed their procedures (protocol). It hardly does for us to say no sound protocol is possible!" he wrote in a memo to NASA space science administrator Noel Hinners. "The point is that to be meaningful the protocol must cover the possibility that the UFO phenomenon is due in part to intelligences far beyond our own." [13] Ironically, it was this very Condon report which set the negative tone within mainstream science and no doubt influenced NASA's flimsy rejection of Carter's scientifically based presidential request. mo Clearly, NASA appears to be an unlikely home for an American UFO agency. But what about the FAA? This agency seems to play a very different role in relationship to UFOs than the civil aviation departments of western European and South American countries, despite its mandate to protect our skies. We must remember that in 2006, the FAA informed the pilots and other aviation witnesses to the disc hovering over O'Hare Airport that it was actually weather, even though the weather was quite normal, it was daylight, and all weather data was recorded through standard procedures. When pressed, the FAA went a step further and attributed the sighting to a hole-punch cloud—a specific and quite rare