crowd behavior mechanism at work in the "bobby-sox craze." Teen-agers
don't know why they squeal and swoon when their current fetish sways
and croons. Yet everybody else is squealing, so they squeal too.
Maybe that great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: "Everybody
wants to get into the act." I am convinced that a certain percentage
of UFO reports come from people who see flying saucers because others
report seeing them.

But this "will to see" may have deeper roots, almost religious
implications, for some people. Consciously or unconsciously, they
want UFO's to be real and to come from outer space. These
individuals, frightened perhaps by threats of atomic destruction, or
lesser fears--who knows what--act as if nothing that men can do can
save the earth. Instead, they seek salvation from outer space, on the
forlorn premise that flying saucer men, by their very existence, are
wiser and more advanced than we. Such people may reason that a race
of men capable of interplanetary travel have lived well into, or
through, an atomic age. They have survived and they can tell us their
secret of survival. Maybe the threat of an atomic war unified their
planet and allowed them to divert their war effort to one of social
and technical advancement. To such people a searchlight on a cloud or
a bright star is an interplanetary spaceship.

If all the UFO reports that the Air Force has received in the past
eight years could be put in this "psychological quirk" category,
Project Blue Book would never have been organized. It is another
class of reports that causes the Air Force to remain interested in
UFO's. This class of reports are called "Unknowns."

In determining the identity of a UFO, the project based its method