SITU,Sanderson, & USOs: a very small peek at the files.

Richard remarked that it would be interesting to see Sanderson's materials for his interest in USOs [undersea or underwater unidentified objects --- "Unidentified Submerged Objects" was I believe the USO intent]. Of course the files are a mess and I'm going back to West Virginia in about two days, so we can't really find out. But it turns out we can take a little peek. Sanderson, like with most of his topical files, created a three-ring notebook dedicated to the USO idea. In fact he had [at least] two of them, that I've found so far. At first glance [and that's all I can do now], it appears that these served as much of the factual basis for his book, Invisible Residents. I've posted a couple of the pages below of what appear to be his original loggings of the cases.

You can read the thumbnail way that Ivan entered his case list --- it is spartan but as detailed as he probably could find it in the sources. At the rear of Invisible Residents he has a longish table of these cases, which is easier to read than one that he was making that is included in this notebook. The two pages above would be examples of perhaps a couple hundred that he would extract to form the book's list. [they by the way are from his "freshwater" list; he kept his "saltwater" or oceanic list separate; it is the much longer of the two]. Doubtless not all detail nor every case appeared in the book, so there is a research project here. But I'm not the guy on this one. If Richard or anyone else wants to come to Kazoo and work on USOs with the Ghost of Sir Ivan, then we'll have to find a way to arrange that.

Richard's other question was about the Navy and whether there is USN information in the notes. Not at first glance with these two notebooks anyway. But sometimes one bumps into things which at least involved the Navy in such files [The Navy is, by the way, the LEAST cooperative of all the services when it comes to making informative replies to things in the UFO field]. But we have a slightly mysterious page [mysterious in that the rest of the story isn't right next to it in the notebook] in the files, which appears to refer to an incident of a missile-like thing breaking through the ice in front of several military ships. I attach that at the bottom for your amusement.

I won't be able to be so responsive most of the time, good people, but I at least promise to give requests a try whenever I can.