Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio: Eickhoff confronts ATIC's Col. O'Mara on UFOs

On 7 June 1954, Pentagon public information officer Capt. Robert White repeated the statistic of 87 reports given on 1 June and countered that reports were at a three-year low because of less publicity. The same day, Cincinnati, Ohio, businessman Thomas Eickhoff, a colleague of Leonard Stringfield, stormed into the office of ATIC Deputy Commander of Intelligence Col. John O'Mara and demanded that ATIC press legal action against the contactees Truman Bethurum, George Adamski, and George Hunt Williamson. O'Mara replied that these people were obvious hoaxers who needed no special action, but let slip that USAF fighters regularly carried movie cameras to photograph UFOs. The next day O'Mara told Stringfield that the Air Force actually received 700 UFO reports a week, that the figure of 87 applied only to cases under "special analysis," that over 1,000 leading scientists were working on government UFO projects, that the material used by Keyhoe in his book had not been cleared through official channels, and that the Utah film existed but showed only conventional objects. An FBI memo from the Cincinnati office dated 8 June 1954 on Bethurum is contained in the PURSUE releases. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.