Charge 7e. They did not take notes during the interview. [Correct. In filling out the report form they obtained all the necessary information. They had been trained not to take additional notes because some witnesses become nervous when they see that their remarks are being written down.]
Basic charge 7. These “omissions” in procedure proved that the sergeants had little intention of making an honest investigation. [Incorrect. They omitted no query that might have yielded useful evidence. Their duty was to report and try to account for the phenomenon observed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, not to record her belief in a hypothetical spaceship. The details of structure and motion that Mr. C wanted to insert in the record were mere impressions based on his assumption that the UFO was a solid object under intelligent control.]
The document repeatedly charged that the investigators asked too few questions, and implied that they asked only five of Mrs. Fitzgerald—yet she answered all the many questions in the standard report form. Furthermore, Mr. C had no way of knowing just how many and what questions were asked; during all the latter part of the interview he was outside the house.
Perhaps the best comment on the Fitzgerald Report and on the activities of civilian saucer-investigation groups in general is that of Dr. Thornton Page, the eminent astronomer who in 1952 served on the scientific panel to evaluate UFO reports (see [Chapter VII]). After receiving a copy of the Fitzgerald Report, he wrote to a member of the Akron Committee:
“As a scientist I am interested in unexplained phenomena, but the one or ones responsible for Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sighting is or are undoubtedly highly complex. It is just as false to say simply that she saw a flying saucer 20 feet in diameter as it is to say that she saw nothing, or that she simply saw the train headlight on a mist. Certainly, I would not expect a pair of Air Force investigators to be able to explain her sighting (and the others) satisfactorily from interviews two weeks after the event. It would be ridiculous to propose that a team of experts in the fields of physics, psychology, meteorology, engineering and railroading be sent to Sheffield Lake, Ohio, to study these sightings from all possible angles.
“I have already written to you and to others that your fundamental error is in oversimplifying your explanations of complex natural phenomena by assuming a common cause without justification. If you say that everything you cannot understand is caused by gremlins, then gremlins are everywhere! And the Air Force would need a much larger budget to investigate every sighting or hearing or feeling of a gremlin!
“... The onus is not on the Air Force or me to prove that no flying saucer was present that night; the onus is on you and your UFO Research Committee to prove that there is no other explanation of what was seen and heard.”
The Open Mind
Of the many astronomical observatories in the United States and abroad, none has ever photographed an object that remotely resembled a spaceship. Since 1957, hundreds of members of Moonwatch teams throughout the world have watched the skies to record passages of the many artificial satellites, but no Moonwatch team has yet reported the presence of a spaceship. Radar stations on all continents keep track of every artificial satellite and fragment of satellite orbiting the earth. In February 1963 there were 284 such objects, originating in Canada, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. If an interloper from beyond our planet should join the parade, Space Track stations would at once detect its presence.
The Air Force has found no evidence of any kind that anyone has ever seen, heard, smelled, photographed, touched, or in any way detected a trace of an interplanetary spacecraft. Extraterrestrial visitors have not yet arrived, and may never arrive. If and when they do, our Air Force wants to be the first to know.