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[no location, but author's preface was written in Washington, D.C]: NICAP [uncredited][National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena], 1967. First Edition. Introduction by Dr. James E. McDonald. Quarto, white wraps imprinted in black. Non-traditionally paginated. Text, charts, case histories, listing of witnesses. Nearly flawless but for coffee stain at extreme corner of back cover and that corner tip of a number of pages, not affecting any text. A solid Very Good. Rare first edition of the absolutely remarkable 1967 research opus of ufologist Ted Bloecher, on the question of just what it was that started in June of 1947 - and why. Kenneth Arnold's famous Cascade Mountain sighting then got the headlines, but there was a crush of American sightings that summer, and more than 850 of them are in this dense and absorbing compendium. University of Arizona Senior Physicist for the Institute of Atmospheric Physics Dr. James McDonald, in his introduction, summarized what this meant: "What I see in all this as primarily important is the abundance of good case-material scattered through a dross of less reliable reports - an abundance that official agencies should have recognized by late 1947 as constituting a problem of the utmost scientific importance. No such recognition appears to have occurred" - and in so saying, echoed through to today's international bafflement about that very question. Bloecher himself, a Columbia drama/theater grad, chose to say the same with a more colorful quote from Charles Fort: "The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries--but the solidity of the procession as a whole; the impressiveness of things that pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming; the irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So, by the damned, I mean the excluded." Then, Bloecher makes the same point yet again, far more eloquently than either of the first two: he simply presents data, page after page of it; he presents "the things that pass" themselves, in the detail his research has afforded. No one can read this without feeling that recognition the absence of which McDonald lamented. Certainly one of the best researched and most seriously presented UFO reports in history; perhaps the single most so. So important, in fact, that Project 1947 has, with permission, recently reprinted the entire book - something which seldom occurs among serious UFO research reports. Originally published for Bloecher by NICAP, which he joined after his CSI group became defunct, though NICAP is not internally credited for the publication. A piece of history within the field. First Edition. L102. Seller Inventory # 001135
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