Project Blue Book - the record cards

For the form, not for the sightings. This is the only source in the collection where the people receiving reports designed an instrument for grading their own confidence, printed it, and were obliged to use it every time.

The vocabulary is better than most of what has been written about this material since. Was, probably, possibly, insufficient data, unknown - five positions on a scale that a fourth-century hagiography, a nineteenth-century compiler and a modern museum catalogue all collapse into one. That the scale existed on a printed form in an office in Ohio is the interesting historical fact.

The limits are equally clear and are not hidden by the card. The office had institutional reasons to prefer explanations to non-explanations, evaluations were made by officers of varying interest and competence, the witnesses were often not re-interviewed, and a great deal turns on who filled in which box. A graded scale used badly still produces a number.

The correspondence filed alongside is kept for a different reason. The routing marks across the face of a letter are the chain of transmission made visible - who read it, when, and what they were told to do next. Everywhere else in this archive that chain has to be inferred from the text that survived it.