With headquarters in Washington, D.C., NICAP strongly reflects the views of its director, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC (Ret.), that UFOs may be interplanetary in origin, sometimes land on earth, but rarely if ever make contact with human beings. Like most saucer believers, many members of NICAP tend to assume without adequate investigation that many unusual sky phenomena reported in the newspapers may be extraterrestrial objects, and they often maintain this attitude in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the BOAC Comet exploded near Calcutta on May 2, 1953, Major Keyhoe theorized that a UFO might accidentally or deliberately have collided with the plane. He continued such speculation even after British aviation officials announced, after months of study, that the crash was caused by metal fatigue[XIII-1]. Many of the items printed in the _UFO Investigator_ are based on incomplete evidence. Under the headline “Strange Series of Fireballs Reported,” NICAP listed a UFO observed on March 7, 1960, at about 8:10 P.M., visible from the Canadian border to Florida, and described by some observers as three or four UFOs flying in formation[XIII-3]. This phenomenon was actually the satellite Discoverer VIII making its final descent to earth. NICAP membership is theoretically open to any non-Communist citizen[XIII-4], but applicants from the “contactee” fringe are not encouraged. The committee once canceled the membership of a space evangelist when he claimed publicly to be a spokesman for NICAP, and in 1958 it canceled the membership of seven famous contactees who had been admitted without the knowledge of the director[XIII-5]. Investigations are carried out as spare-time projects of the members themselves, some of whom constitute an advisory panel of experts. Although many are highly respected in their own professions--television, journalism, military science, religion, government, aviation, engineering, medicine, psychology, and teaching in the physical sciences--few are recognized specialists in the fields required for the analysis of most UFO cases--radar propagation, the physics of optics, meteorology, and astronomy. Since 1957 a major goal of NICAP has been a Congressional inquiry that supposedly would reveal an Air Force conspiracy to deny the reality of flying saucers[XIII-7]. In 1957 the director lodged a formal complaint with a member of the United States Senate charging that the Air Force continually made false statements on UFOs to the press, the public, and members of Congress. In support of this accusation Major Keyhoe submitted summaries of more than two hundred incidents[XIII-7].