With all that in mind, they then attempted to bring it together into a single type of craft, or flying saucer. Maccabee wrote about this: "Thus we must assume that even the Battelle investigators believed that each of the other sightings was valid. This would explain why they did not attempt to explain each one, but rather to explain them away by 'conglomeration': in combination, the cases do not point to a single model 'flying saucer'; therefore, avoids the sticky problem of explaining how a Reserve Air Force captain and an airline captain could be fooled into thinking that they saw a circular craft with a flashing light on top and steady lights on the bottom pass in front of the airliner they were flying. [This is a reference to Case XI in the Battelle report from March 20, 1950 in which the pilots watched a circular object.] The object was in view for about half a minute."
Maccabee also notes, "Still another case they avoided explaining may be one of the most credible on record. The summary in SR 14 [Special Report #14] does not do the case justice… Case X [which took place on May 24, 1949] describes a sighting by two aeronautical engineers who worked at the Ames Research Laboratory and three other people. Each engineer had the opportunity to observe a 'flying saucer' through binoculars for a period exceeding 60 seconds. The drawings produced by these witnesses were extremely detailed. The intelligence information on this case is missing from the Project Blue Book section of the microfilm record at the National Archives. However, Maccabee has found the original interviews, etc. in the Office of Special Investigations section of the microfilm record and has published the information along with some supplementary weather data."
Air Force writers had suggested, "It can never be absolutely proven that 'flying saucers' do not exist. This would be true if the data obtained were to include complete scientific measurements of the attributes of each sighting, as well as complete and detailed descriptions of the objects sighted. It might be possible to demonstrate the existence of 'flying saucers' with data of this type, IF they were to exist."
So now we see the problem they had. Explain the sightings with "incomplete" data or so they would have us believe. But, as Maccabee pointed out, Case X had the very attributes the Air Force suggested didn't exist. There were qualified witnesses, that is, two aeronautical engineers, who had ample opportunity to observe the craft through binoculars. This wasn't a case, such as the Chiles-Whitted sighting in which the object flashed by. This was a case where minutes passed as the observation continued enabling the witnesses to take notes.
In fact, what we see from this report is that there is TOO much information to allow investigators to find a plausible explanation. They have all the information they could desire from the location and exact time, to the descriptions of the craft including detailed drawings. No natural phenomenon is going to explain it. Nor will it be eliminated as a misidentification of military or civilian aircraft. It will remain unknown.
To eliminate it, then, it is combined with other cases in which there is no good, plausible explanation. All the information is correlated and an attempt is made to produce a single type of flying saucer. The assumption seems to be that if flying saucers were real, then we would be able to take the cases and combine them to produce a composite "model" of a flying saucer in much the same way that police artists can produce a composite of a single criminal.
The assumption being made here, and one that should be obvious to everyone, is that more than one type of craft could be involved. Take, for example, an aircraft carrier from our modern Navy. It's floating in the Mediterranean Sea and launching a variety of aircraft to survey the surrounding territory. We know that such ships carry two or three different types of jet fighters, as well as a variety of reconnaissance aircraft, tankers and even helicopters.
Now, let's say that we have a number of people who have seen those various aircraft over a period of a couple of months. We interview them, study the weather, length of sightings and locations of each of them. From that we attempt to build a model of the aircraft on the carrier, assuming there to be a single type.
Given that we have a craft with swept wings and a narrow fuselage, a huge craft with two engines, another with no wings but a rotor overhead, with different configurations for the lighting, we would be unable to manufacture a single model. Should we then conclude that no sightings were made? Should we conclude that, with better information, we would have been able to answer the questions? No. We have more than one type and by combining information that shouldn't be combined, we have destroyed our data base.
Of course, by combining that information we can suggest that there is no commonality among the sightings. We can deduce that each of the witnesses is mistaken in some critical observation. We can suggest that this proves there is nothing to the sightings of these very common, to us, aircraft. And each of these conclusions would be wrong, though, to a hurried and noncritical reader of our work, we have demonstrated a "flaw" in the sighting reports. We can now reject them.
There were many other critics of Special Report #14. Leon Davidson, who had been a scientist at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and who had been a member of the group who had studied the Green Fireballs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, printed and sold copies of the report along with his analysis. He believed that flying saucers did exist and saw the report as a clever attempt to hide the fact. Davidson pointed out the discrepancy between the information contained in the report's summary and the contents of the press release that "announced" it.
He noted that in the report, "Unknown sightings constitute 33.3 % of all the object sightings for which the reliability of the sighting is considered 'Excellent.'" In other words, contrary to what the report's authors had suggested, the better the report, the more likely it was going to be an unknown. It wasn't the reports from unqualified observers who saw an object for seconds that caused the most trouble. It was reports from trained and qualified witnesses that were more likely to be inexplicable.
The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a civilian organization based in Washington, D.C., also disputed the idea that a model couldn't be created. They cited a 1949 Project Grudge analysis, which reported, "The most numerous reports indicate daytime observations of metallic disc-like objects roughly in diameter ten times their thickness… From this official description a working model of a UFO or flying saucer can be built without the slightest trouble."
In other words, there was one "official" report that refuted another official report. The argument about creating the model was actually an argument over the cosmetics of the situation. Looked at in that way, then a model can be created, and one of the major conclusions of the Battelle report has been eliminated.
Hynek, as Blue Book's chief scientific consultant, was in a unique position. He had been on the inside as many of the cases were investigated. He had participated in many of those investigations, and knew the people involved. Even with his close working relationship with Blue Book, he was surprised at the allegation in Special Report #14 that there was no difference between the knowns and the unknowns. What the report suggested was that the characteristics of the known cases matched those of the unknowns. Scientists had assumed that there would be a difference between the knowns and unknowns. A lack of difference suggested that the UFO phenomenon was little more than misidentifications of natural phenomena and conventional aircraft. That was a point, this lack of difference, that had been seized upon to suggest that UFO sightings were simple misidentifications.
The Battelle researchers had applied the chi-square test to the two groups of data, that is, the known and unknown categories. The chi-square test for independence is used for comparing two or more groups to determine if different patterns of frequencies exist in the groups. The theory behind the use of the chi-square test by Battelle was that the known cases should differ from the unknown cases if there were UFOs. Textbooks argue that chi-square is an often misused statistical procedure. It often looks good, but the analysis can be of little real value when misapplied as it was here.