The July Crisis
Much of current UFO's lore focuses on July 1947, no doubt an important month. Even so, July 1952 may be the single most important month in American history, from the perspective of the UFO. That month, ATIC received a whopping 536 reports, with unknowns running at 40 percent. The 1952 wave reached its peak in July, not only within the United States, but in Europe and North Africa. Yet today, this period of time receives scant attention within the UFO story.
From Ruppelt's perspective, the split in opinions about what to do over UFOs widened every day. One group was "dead-serious about the situation." They wanted (1) a policy of starting from the assumption that UFOs were interplanetary, and (2) a clampdown on the release of information. According to Ruppelt, this group thought that the security classification of the project should go up to Top Secret. He wrote that their enthusiasm "took a firm hold in the Pentagon" and many other agencies throughout the government. Samford apparently kept the brakes on this group, and wanted Blue Book to keep "an open mind" on the subject. By the end of the month, events forced a public confrontation and a behind-the-scenes decision on the matter of UFOs.