[BLANK] reported cigar cylinder observation — August 12, 1960

Text from the document: Left side: 1. Air Force program that investigated unidentified flying objects (UFOs). LOFTIN: This thing you might do, depending on what size of operation you are talking about, is to develop the capability of rendezvous and that you might call a space ferry - a recovery-type vehicle, with the space vehicles, so that as one capsule left to take one crew home, another one capsule come in, perform a rendezvous maneuver and transfer a new crew in. Let's talk about this big inflatable balloon that you passed the picture around on. This configuration shows our considerations at two possibilities of how expandable structures might be used in a space vehicle, and in the upper left hand side for comparison show a configuration which might be a metallic cylinder, possibly the final stage of a booster. As you can see, in the lower left-hand side, completely packaged, the inflatable components make closely with the booster configuration. As you can see, in the lower left-hand side, completely packaged, the inflatable components are securely attached. Here we have the model that you saw in the movie. (See figure 14.) You can see that the mission module and Mercury capsule would be launched in this configuration. Working with the Air Force and NASA, using their laboratories, we found that you can handle these ballistic-type vehicles, which you can see at the left here, with a torus-type ring around it, which can be attached to a re-entry vehicle or escape capsule. The image contains a photograph titled "LIGHT WING LOADING RE-ENTRY VEHICLE", which appears to depict a spacecraft or unidentified flying object. If we increase it by getting it beyond the interference of the balloon, the trailing string that you saw was the means of preventing it from getting all wound up. The other type of re-entry that we might want to discuss is what can you do about coming from outer space and flying down to a pre-determined landing space.