William E. Smith Interview, 11 July 2001(a)

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JK

Well, one of the B-52 crew said that there was a team from Washington that came out.

WS

I remember a colonel or a major came out and spent some time in a camper at some of our —the reason I know that he was there is because we were told that he was going to be spending some time, and he had a camper, I think he borrowed one of our campers and was going to be out and about, and we were given his name and all that kind of thing so we could identify him, but he was not on site but he was posted near site, and he was just out there trying to see what he could see. That was my understanding of the whole thing, anyway.

JK

Well, Project Blue Book—I don't know if you have dug into this at all over the years or you know much about it, but they really didn't have much of an investigative team. They only had four people on staff at Wright-Patterson for the project.

WS

Right. Half-hearted approach.

JK

It was a colonel or a captain in charge and then a secretary and a staff sergeant. But there were other organizations that did come out. Now, one of the B-52 guys recall a team, he said a team of several people, maybe three or four people came from Washington. But that's all we have. There is nothing in the documents that indicate that, and the guy can't remember what their unit of origin or their activity name was so we could try to trace it.

WS

If they're from Washington, they were—Blue Book was out of Wright-Pat, wasn't it?

JK

That's correct.

WS

Yeah. The person, as I recall, was from I want to say Washington, and I think he was either a major or a colonel, and we were given his information because, again, anybody that sits up close to sites, we were supposed to monitor them and approach them and identify who they were. And I remember one time my team reported that he was at one of our very northern sites, and I think Oscar-2, which is almost up near the Canadian border. I think they had reported he was there. They had identified him. And this, you know, so we just let him alone because, again, we had information he was going to be out and it was based upon the project and upon the information that we had already submitted to the process. But, yeah, really interesting things, I am telling you.

JK

Yeah, this is a fascinating case for me. I have been working on it almost every day for six or seven months now.

WS

Isn't it interesting how we have strange bed fellows here. How after all these years people are talking about an incident that happened that seemingly the government doesn't want us to talk about probably.

JK

Well, the Blue Book conclusions—I mean, I believe I can say that it's fairly well established that what Blue Book’s job was to provide an explanation.

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