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Smith, about the UFO subject in general. One of the things we talked about was a new approach to the UFO problem--that of trying to prove that the motion of a UFO as it flew through the air was
intelligently controlled.
I don't know who would get credit for originating the idea of trying to analyze the motion of the UFO's. It was one of those kinds of ideas that are passed around,
with everyone adding a few modifications. We'd been talking about making a study of this idea for a long time, but we hadn't had many reports to work with; but now,
with the mass of data that we had accumulated in June and July and August, the prospects of such a study looked promising.
The basic aim of the study would be to learn whether the motion of the reported UFO's was random or ordered. Random motion is an unordered, helter-skelter motion very
similar to a swarm of gnats or flies milling around. There is no apparent pattern or purpose to their flight paths. But take, for example, swallows flying around a
chimney--they wheel, dart, and dip, but if you watch them closely, they have a definite pattern in their movements--an ordered motion. The definite pattern is
intelligently controlled because they are catching bugs or getting in line to go down the chimney.
By the fall of 1952 we had a considerable number of well-documented reports in which the UFO's made a series of maneuvers. If we could prove that these maneuvers were
not random, but ordered, it would be proof that the UFO's were things that were intelligently controlled.
During our discussion Major Fournet brought up two reports in which the UFO seemed to know what it was doing and wasn't just aimlessly darting around. One of these was
the recent sighting from Haneda AFB, Japan, and the other was the incident that happened on the night of July 29, when an F-94 attempted to intercept a UFO over
eastern Michigan. In both cases radar had established the track of the UFO.
In the Haneda Incident, according to the sketch of the UFO's track, each turn the UFO made was constant and the straight "legs" between the turns were about
the same length. The sketch of the UFO's flight path as it moved back and forth over Tokyo Bay reminded me very much of the "crisscross" search patterns we
used to fly during World War II when we were searching for the crew of a ditched airplane. The only time the UFO seriously deviated from this pattern was when the F-
94 got on its tail.
The Michigan sighting was even better, however. In this case there was a definite reason for every move that the UFO made. It made a 180- degree turn because the F-94
was closing on it head on. It alternately increased and decreased its speed, but every time it did this it was because the F-94 was