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Can you tell us a little bit about Moon Dust and Blue Fly?
Clifford Stone: In peacetime—I must stress peace-time because the unit did have a wartime mission (which I will get to later on)—the mission of Project Moon Dust was the overall field exploitation program for the location and recovery of non-U.S. space debris that survived reentry into the earth's atmosphere. The Air Force teams that were sent out to gather this material were known as Operation Blue Fly. These consisted of 3- to 18man teams sent out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where the Air Force unit that dealt with this investigation was located at the time.
The other item of interest that both these missions were tied to was objects of unknown origin. This becomes key when you realize that it was not until the Soviet launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957, that we would have space debris up there belonging to anyone, yet we have documentation showing that Moon Dust and Blue Fly existed at least as early as January 1950. What was going on at that time with Moon Dust and Blue Fly?
Now, we have a hint at what was happening. In documents we have thus far recovered from the archives and other government agencies, we find that, in January of 1953, the United States Air Force had a newly formed intelligence unit known as the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron. It had no peacetime mission; it had only a wartime mission. I now know that in Europe, during the same time frame, the 5008th Air Intelligence Service Squadron came into existence. Once again, there was no peacetime mission; outside of training, this unit had no mission at all. The Director of Air Intelligence suggested that Project Blue Book needed assistance in doing investigations, primarily because Blue Book did not have funding for investigations of reports of unidentified flying objects. This resulted in these two units being assigned the investigation of UFOs in their respective areas—the 4602nd in the continental United States, the 5008th in Europe.
Each base had a Project Blue Book officer as an additional duty to handle the cases. Air Force Regulation 200-2, of August 26, 1953, made it clear that these officers were to do nothing more than a preliminary investigation and report to the representative of either the 4602nd, if it was stateside, or the 5008th overseas (which was handled by another regulation, by the way). These intelligence units then would decide whether or not the report was worthy of further investigation. If something was deemed worthy, they would do the coordination, sometimes even contacting the witnesses directly without identifying themselves as part of this intelligence unit.
Once they completed their reports, they forwarded them to Wright-Patterson in accordance with regulations. Everyone thought, 'Well, that meant Blue Book.' This was incorrect. Blue Book had four Project Moon Dust monitoring officers. They had also four Project Blue Fly monitoring officers. They had a dedicated military air transport service known as the 64th Mass Heavy Squadron that would assist in the retrieval of any type of debris. The regulations at that time made it clear—internal memos made it clear— that every effort would be made to collect debris of unidentified flying objects. One of those is known as Intelligence Collection General Letter Number 4. To date, the Air Force considers that particular regulation, of 1961 vintage and later, to be classified—not releasable.
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