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By the early 1950s, the United States Air Force faced a problem that was becoming increasingly difficult to contain. Reports of unidentified objects were continuing to arrive from across the country. The military had already tried Project Sign and Project Grudge, but neither had brought the subject to a satisfactory conclusion. The public wanted answers. The military wanted certainty. And neither was getting what it wanted. In 1952, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt became one of the most important figures in the official investigation of UFOs. Ruppelt was an Air Force officer and intelligence specialist. He approached the subject differently from some of his predecessors. He wanted UFO reports investigated in a systematic way. He also preferred the term "Unidentified Flying Object" because it was more precise than "flying saucer." A flying saucer suggested a particular shape. An unidentified flying object described a problem. Something had been observed. It had not been identified. That was the question Ruppelt wanted investigators to answer. Under Project Blue Book, reports were examined using a range of possible explanations. Investigators considered aircraft. They considered balloons. They considered astronomical objects such as planets and meteors. They considered weather conditions and atmospheric effects. They also considered human error, hoaxes and misidentifications. This was a sensible starting point. Before claiming that an object was something extraordinary, investigators needed to establish whether it could be something ordinary. The difficulty was the sheer number of reports. Some witnesses provided excellent information. Others could offer little more than a description of a light moving across the sky. Distance was particularly difficult to judge. A small object close to an observer could appear enormous. A large object at high altitude could appear tiny. Speed was equally difficult to estimate without knowing the object's distance. A light that appeared to move rapidly might actually have been moving slowly at a great distance. These problems made the investigation of eyewitness reports extremely challenging. Yet not every case was easily dismissed. Some reports involved multiple witnesses. Some involved trained military observers. Others were associated with radar observations. These cases attracted particular attention because they appeared to provide information beyond a single person's visual impression. But even radar was not infallible. Radar systems could produce false or misleading returns under certain atmospheric conditions. Temperature inversions, for example, can affect the way radar signals travel through the atmosphere and can sometimes produce unusual returns. This would become particularly important during the famous Washington, D.C., sightings of 1952. Project Blue Book therefore found itself caught between two competing demands. The public wanted to know whether UFOs represented something extraordinary. The military needed to know whether they represented a threat. Those were not necessarily the same question. A strange object could be unidentified without being extraterrestrial. It could also be unidentified without being harmless. A secret foreign aircraft, for example, would be extremely important even if it had nothing to do with another planet. This was the security problem facing the Air Force. The Cold War meant that the military could not afford to ignore unusual activity in American airspace. At the same time, the government could not reveal every classified aircraft project simply to explain a UFO report. This created an unavoidable gap between what the government knew and what the public was told. That gap would become fertile ground for suspicion. Ruppelt's period in charge of the investigation was relatively short, but it was important. He attempted to bring greater discipline to the collection and analysis of reports. He also recognized that the subject could not be handled entirely as a public-relations problem. Some cases genuinely required