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Title: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects

Author: Edward J. Ruppelt

Release date: December 18, 2005 [eBook #17346]
Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17346

Credits: Produced by The Blue Book Archive

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REPORT
ON UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS ***

Produced by The Blue Book Archive

THE REPORT ON
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING
OBJECTS
BY EDWARD J. RUPPELT
Former Head of the Air Force Project Blue Book

Published by
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
Garden City, New York

Note: This work was originally Copyright ? 1956 by Edward J. Ruppelt.
This book is now in the public domain because it was not renewed in a
timely fashion at the US Copyright Office, as required by law at the time.

Contents

Foreword
1 Project Blue Book and the UFO Story
2 The Era of Confusion Begins
3 The Classics
4 Green Fireballs, Project Twinkle, Little Lights, and Grudge
5 The Dark Ages
6 The Presses Roll—The Air Force Shrugs
7 The Pentagon Rumbles
8 The Lubbock Lights, Unabridged
9 The New Project Grudge

10 Project Blue Book and the Big Build-Up
11 The Big Flap
12 The Washington Merry-Go-Round
13 Hoax or Horror?
14 Digesting the Data
15 The Radiation Story
16 The Hierarchy Ponders
17 What Are UFO's?
18 And They're Still Flying
19 Off They Go into the Wild Blue Yonder
20 Do They or Don't They?

to ELIZABETH and KRIS

Foreword

This is a book about unidentified flying objects—UFO's—"flying
saucers." It is actually more than a book; it is a report because it is the first
time that anyone, either military or civilian, has brought together in one
document all the facts about this fascinating subject. With the exception of
the style, this report is written exactly the way I would have written it had I
been officially asked to do so while I was chief of the Air Force's project for
investigating UFO reports—Project Blue Book.

In many instances I have left out the names of the people who reported
seeing UFO's, or the names of certain people who were associated with the
project, just as I would have done in an official report. For the same reason
I have changed the locale in which some of the UFO sightings occurred.
This is especially true in chapter fifteen, the story of how some of our

atomic scientists detected radiation whenever UFO's were reported near
their "UFO-detection stations." This policy of not identifying the "source,"
to borrow a term from military intelligence, is insisted on by the Air Force
so that the people who have co-operated with them will not get any
unwanted publicity. Names are considered to be "classified information."

But the greatest care has been taken to make sure that the omission of
names and changes in locale has in no way altered the basic facts because
this report is based on the facts—all of the facts—nothing of significance
has been left out.

It was only after considerable deliberation that I put this report together,
because it had to be told accurately, with no holds barred. I finally decided
to do it for two reasons. First, there is world- wide interest in flying saucers;
people want to know the facts. But more often than not these facts have
been obscured by secrecy and confusion, a situation that has led to wild
speculation on one end of the scale and an almost dangerously blas? attitude
on the other. It is only when all of the facts are laid out that a correct
evaluation can be made.

Second, after spending two years investigating and analyzing UFO
reports, after talking to the people who have seen UFO's— industrialists,
pilots, engineers, generals, and just the plain man- on-the-street, and after
discussing the subject with many very capable scientists, I felt that I was in
a position to be able to put together the complete account of the Air Force's
struggle with the flying saucer.

The report has been difficult to write because it involves something that
doesn't officially exist. It is well known that ever since the first flying
saucer was reported in June 1947 the Air Force has officially said that there
is no proof that such a thing as an interplanetary spaceship exists. But what
is not well known is that this conclusion is far from being unanimous

among the military and their scientific advisers because of the one word,
proof; so the UFO investigations continue.

The hassle over the word "proof" boils down to one question: What
constitutes proof? Does a UFO have to land at the River Entrance to the
Pentagon, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff offices? Or is it proof when a
ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the jet pilot
sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a
phenomenal speed? Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to
his story even under the threat of court-martial? Does this constitute proof?

The at times hotly debated answer to this question may be the answer to
the question, "Do the UFO's really exist?"

I'll give you the facts—all of the facts—you decide.

July 1955, E. J. RUPPELT

CHAPTER ONE

Project Blue Book and the UFO Story

In the summer of 1952 a United States Air Force F-86 jet interceptor shot
at a flying saucer.

This fact, like so many others that make up the full flying saucer story,
has never before been told.

I know the full story about flying saucers and I know that it has never
before been told because I organized and was chief of the Air Force's
Project Blue Book, the special project set up to investigate and analyze

unidentified flying object, or UFO, reports. (UFO is the official term that I
created to replace the words "flying saucers.")

There is a fighter base in the United States which I used to visit
frequently because, during 1951, 1952, and 1953, it got more than its share
of good UFO reports.

The commanding officer of the fighter group, a full colonel and
command pilot, believed that UFO's were real. The colonel believed in
UFO's because he had a lot of faith in his pilots—and they had chased
UFO's in their F-86's. He had seen UFO's on the scopes of his radar sets,
and he knew radar.

The colonel's intelligence officer, a captain, didn't exactly believe that
UFO's were real, but he did think that they warranted careful investigation.
The logic the intelligence officer used in investigating UFO reports—and in
getting answers to many of them— made me wish many times that he
worked for me on Project Blue Book.

One day the intelligence officer called me at my base in Dayton, Ohio.
He wanted to know if I was planning to make a trip his way soon. When I
told him I expected to be in his area in about a week, he asked me to be sure
to look him up. There was no special hurry, he added, but he had something
very interesting to show me.

When we got wind of a good story, Project Blue Book liked to start
working on it at once, so I asked the intelligence officer to tell me what he
had. But nothing doing. He didn't want to discuss it over the phone. He
even vetoed the idea of putting it into a secret wire. Such extreme caution
really stopped me, because anything can be coded and put in a wire.

When I left Dayton about a week later I decided to go straight to the
fighter base, planning to arrive there in midmorning. But while I was
changing airlines my reservations got fouled up, and I was faced with
waiting until evening to get to the base. I called the intelligence officer and
told him about the mix-up. He told me to hang on right there and he would
fly over and pick me up in a T-33 jet.

As soon as we were in the air, on the return trip, I called the intelligence
officer on the interphone and asked him what was going on. What did he
have? Why all the mystery? He tried to tell me, but the interphone wasn't
working too well and I couldn't understand what he was saying. Finally he
told me to wait until we returned to his office and I could read the report
myself.

Report! If he had a UFO report why hadn't he sent it in to Project
Blue Book as he usually did?

We landed at the fighter base, checked in our parachutes, Mae Wests, and
helmets, and drove over to his office. There were several other people in the
office, and they greeted me with the usual question, "What's new on the
flying saucer front?" I talked with them for a while, but was getting
impatient to find out what was on the intelligence officer's mind. I was just
about to ask him about the mysterious report when he took me to one side
and quietly asked me not to mention it until everybody had gone.

Once we were alone, the intelligence officer shut the door, went over to
his safe, and dug out a big, thick report. It was the standard Air Force
reporting form that is used for all intelligence reports, including UFO
reports. The intelligence officer told me that this was the only existing copy.
He said that he had been told to destroy all copies, but had saved one for me
to read.

With great curiosity, I took the report and started to read. What had
happened at this fighter base?

About ten o'clock in the morning, one day a few weeks before, a radar
near the base had picked up an unidentified target. It was an odd target in
that it came in very fast—about 700 miles per hour— and then slowed
down to about 100 miles per hour. The radar showed that it was located
northeast of the airfield, over a sparsely settled area.

Unfortunately the radar station didn't have any height-finding equipment.
The operators knew the direction of the target and its distance from the
station but they didn't know its altitude. They reported the target, and two F-
86's were scrambled.

The radar picked up the F-86's soon after they were airborne, and had
begun to direct them into the target when the target started to fade on the
radarscope. At the time several of the operators thought that this fade was
caused by the target's losing altitude rapidly and getting below the radar's
beam. Some of the other operators thought that it was a high-flying target
and that it was fading just because it was so high.

In the debate which followed, the proponents of the high-flying theory
won out, and the F-86's were told to go up to 40,000 feet. But before the
aircraft could get to that altitude, the target had been completely lost on the
radarscope.

The F-86's continued to search the area at 40,000 feet, but could see
nothing. After a few minutes the aircraft ground controller called the F-86's
and told one to come down to 20,000 feet, the other to 5,000 feet, and
continue the search. The two jets made a quick letdown, with one pilot
stopping at 20,000 feet and the other heading for the deck.

The second pilot, who was going down to 5,000 feet, was just beginning
to pull out when he noticed a flash below and ahead of him. He flattened
out his dive a little and headed toward the spot where he had seen the light.
As he closed on the spot he suddenly noticed what he first thought was a
weather balloon. A few seconds later he realized that it couldn't be a balloon
because it was staying ahead of him. Quite an achievement for a balloon,
since he had built up a lot of speed in his dive and now was flying almost
straight and level at 3,000 feet and was traveling "at the Mach."

Again the pilot pushed the nose of the F-86 down and started after the
object. He closed fairly fast, until he came to within an estimated 1,000
yards. Now he could get a good look at the object. Although it had looked
like a balloon from above, a closer view showed that it was definitely round
and flat—saucer-shaped. The pilot described it as being "like a doughnut
without a hole."

As his rate of closure began to drop off, the pilot knew that the object
was picking up speed. But he pulled in behind it and started to follow. Now
he was right on the deck.

About this time the pilot began to get a little worried. What should he do?
He tried to call his buddy, who was flying above him somewhere in the area
at 20,000 feet. He called two or three times but could get no answer. Next
he tried to call the ground controller but he was too low for his radio to
carry that far. Once more he tried his buddy at 20,000 feet, but again no
luck.

By now he had been following the object for about two minutes and
during this time had closed the gap between them to approximately 500
yards. But this was only momentary. Suddenly the object began to pull
away, slowly at first, then faster. The pilot, realizing that he couldn't catch
it, wondered what to do next.

When the object traveled out about 1,000 yards, the pilot suddenly made
up his mind—he did the only thing that he could do to stop the UFO. It was
like a David about to do battle with a Goliath, but he had to take a chance.
Quickly charging his guns, he started shooting. . . . A moment later the
object pulled up into a climb and in a few seconds it was gone. The pilot
climbed to 10,000 feet, called the other F-86, and now was able to contact
his buddy. They joined up and went back to their base.

As soon as he had landed and parked, the F-86 pilot went into operations
to tell his story to his squadron commander. The mere fact that he had fired
his guns was enough to require a detailed report, as a matter of routine. But
the circumstances under which the guns actually were fired created a major
disturbance at the fighter base that day.

After the squadron commander had heard his pilot's story, he called the
group commander, the colonel, and the intelligence officer. They heard the
pilot's story.

For some obscure reason there was a "personality clash," the intelligence
officer's term, between the pilot and the squadron commander. This was
obvious, according to the report I was reading, because the squadron
commander immediately began to tear the story apart and accuse the pilot
of "cracking up," or of just "shooting his guns for the hell of it and using the
wild story as a cover-up."

Other pilots in the squadron, friends of the accused pilot— including the
intelligence officer and a flight surgeon—were called in to "testify." All of
these men were aware of the fact that in certain instances a pilot can "flip"
for no good reason, but none of them said that he had noticed any
symptoms of mental crack-up in the unhappy pilot.

None, except the squadron commander. He kept pounding home his idea
— that the pilot was "psycho"—and used a few examples of what the report
called "minor incidents" to justify his stand.

Finally the pilot who had been flying with the "accused" man was called
in. He said that he had been monitoring the tactical radio channel but that he
hadn't heard any calls from his buddy's low- flying F-86. The squadron
commander triumphantly jumped on this point, but the accused pilot tended
to refute it by admitting he was so jumpy that he might not have been on the
right channel. But when he was asked if he had checked or changed
channels after he had lost the object and before he had finally contacted the
other F-86, he couldn't remember.

So ended the pilot's story and his interrogation.

The intelligence officer wrote up his report of a UFO sighting, but at the
last minute, just before sending it, he was told to hold it back. He was a
little unhappy about this turn of events, so he went in to see why the group
commander had decided to delay sending the report to Project Blue Book.

They talked over the possible reactions to the report. If it went out it
would cause a lot of excitement, maybe unnecessarily. Yet, if the pilot
actually had seen what he claimed, it was vitally important to get the report
in to ATIC immediately. The group commander said that he would made his
decision after a talk with his executive officer. They decided not to send the
report and ordered it destroyed.

When I finished reading, the intelligence officer's first comment was,
"What do you think?"

Since the evaluation of the report seemed to hinge upon conflicts
between personalities I didn't know, I could venture no opinion, except that

the incident made up the most fascinating UFO report I'd ever seen. So I
batted the intelligence officer's question back to him.

"I know the people involved," he replied, "and I don't think the pilot was
nuts. I can't give you the report, because Colonel ——— told me to destroy
it. But I did think you should know about it." Later he burned the report.

The problems involved in this report are typical. There are certain
definite facts that can be gleaned from it; the pilot did see something and he
did shoot at something, but no matter how thoroughly you investigate the
incident that something can never be positively identified. It might have
been a hallucination or it might have been some vehicle from outer space;
no one will ever know. It was a UFO.

The UFO story started soon after June 24, 1947, when newspapers all
over the United States carried the first flying saucer report. The story told
how nine very bright, disk-shaped objects were seen by Kenneth Arnold, a
Boise, Idaho, businessman, while he was flying his private plane near
Mount Rainier, in the state of Washington. With journalistic license,
reporters converted Arnold's description of the individual motion of each of
the objects—like "a saucer skipping across water"—into "flying saucer," a
name for the objects themselves. In the eight years that have passed since
Arnold's memorable sighting, the term has become so common that it is
now in Webster's Dictionary and is known today in most languages in the
world.

For a while after the Arnold sighting the term "flying saucer" was used to
describe all disk-shaped objects that were seen flashing through the sky at
fantastic speeds. Before long, reports were made of objects other than disks,
and these were also called flying saucers. Today the words are popularly
applied to anything seen in the sky that cannot be identified as a common,
everyday object.

Thus a flying saucer can be a formation of lights, a single light, a sphere,
or any other shape; and it can be any color. Performance-wise, flying
saucers can hover, go fast or slow, go high or low, turn 90- degree corners,
or disappear almost instantaneously.

Obviously the term "flying saucer" is misleading when applied to objects
of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military
prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects.
UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short.

Officially the military uses the term "flying saucer" on only two
occasions. First in an explanatory sense, as when briefing people who are
unacquainted with the term "UFO": "UFO—you know—flying saucers."
And second in a derogatory sense, for purposes of ridicule, as when it is
observed, "He says he saw a flying saucer."

This second form of usage is the exclusive property of those persons who
positively know that all UFO's are nonsense. Fortunately, for the sake of
good manners if for no other reason, the ranks of this knowing category are
constantly dwindling. One by one these people drop out, starting with the
instant they see their first UFO.

Some weeks after the first UFO was seen on June 24, 1947, the Air Force
established a project to investigate and analyze all UFO reports. The
attitude toward this task varied from a state of near panic, early in the life of
the project, to that of complete contempt for anyone who even mentioned
the words "flying saucer."

This contemptuous attitude toward "flying saucer nuts" prevailed from
mid-1949 to mid-1950. During that interval many of the people who were,
or had been, associated with the project believed that the public was
suffering from "war nerves."

Early in 1950 the project, for all practical purposes, was closed out; at
least it rated only minimum effort. Those in power now reasoned that if you
didn't mention the words "flying saucers" the people would forget them and
the saucers would go away. But this reasoning was false, for instead of
vanishing, the UFO reports got better and better.

Airline pilots, military pilots, generals, scientists, and dozens of other
people were reporting UFO's, and in greater detail than in reports of the
past. Radars, which were being built for air defense, began to pick up some
very unusual targets, thus lending technical corroboration to the
unsubstantiated claims of human observers.

As a result of the continuing accumulation of more impressive UFO
reports, official interest stirred. Early in 1951 verbal orders came down
from Major General Charles P. Cabell, then Director of Intelligence for
Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, to make a study reviewing the UFO situation
for Air Force Headquarters.

I had been back in the Air Force about six months when this happened.
During the second world war I had been a B-29 bombardier and radar
operator. I went to India, China, and later to the Pacific, with the original B-
29 wing. I flew two DCF's, and some Air Medals' worth of missions, got
out of the Air Force after the war, and went back to college. To keep my
reserve status while I was in school, I flew as a navigator in an Air Force
Reserve Troop Carrier Wing.

Not long after I received my degree in aeronautical engineering, the
Korean War started, and I went back on active duty. I was assigned to the
Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in
Dayton, Ohio. ATIC is responsible for keeping track of all foreign aircraft
and guided missiles. ATIC also had the UFO project.

I had just finished organizing a new intelligence group when General
Cabell's order to review past UFO reports came down. Lieutenant
Colonel Rosengarten, who received the order at ATIC, called me in and
wanted to know if I'd take the job of making the review. I accepted.

When the review was finished, I went to the Pentagon and presented my
findings to Major General Samford, who had replaced General Cabell as
Director of Intelligence.

ATIC soon got the word to set up a completely new project for the
investigation and analysis of UFO reports. Since I had made the review of
past UFO reports I was the expert, and I got the new job. It was given the
code name Project Blue Book, and I was in charge of it until late in 1953.
During this time members of my staff and I traveled close to half a million
miles. We investigated dozens of UFO reports, and read and analyzed
several thousand more. These included every report ever received by the Air
Force.

For the size of the task involved Project Blue Book was always
understaffed, even though I did have ten people on my regular staff plus
many paid consultants representing every field of science. All of us on
Project Blue Book had Top Secret security clearances so that security was
no block in our investigations. Behind this organization was a reporting
network made up of every Air Force base intelligence officer and every Air
Force radar station in the world, and the Air Defense Command's Ground
Observer Corps. This reporting net sent Project Blue Book reports on every
conceivable type of UFO, by every conceivable type of person.

What did these people actually see when they reported that they had
observed a UFO? Putting aside truly unidentifiable flying objects for the
present, this question has several answers.

In many instances it has been positively proved that people have reported
balloons, airplanes, stars, and many other common objects as UFO's. The
people who make such reports don't recognize these common objects
because something in their surroundings temporarily assumes an unfamiliar
appearance.

Unusual lighting conditions are a common cause of such illusions. A
balloon will glow like a "ball of fire" just at sunset. Or an airplane that is
not visible to the naked eye suddenly starts to reflect the sun's rays and
appears to be a "silver ball." Pilots in F- 94 jet interceptors chase Venus in
the daytime and fight with balloons at night, and people in Los Angeles see
weird lights.

On October 8, 1954, many Los Angeles newspapers and newscasters
carried an item about a group of flying saucers, bright lights, flying in a V
formation. The lights had been seen from many locations over Southern
California. Pilots saw them while bringing their airplanes into Los Angeles
International Airport, Air Force pilots flying out of Long Beach saw them,
two CBS reporters in Hollywood gave an eyewitness account, and countless
people called police and civil defense officials. All of them excitedly
reported lights they could not identify. The next day the Air Force identified
the UFO's; they were Air Force airplanes, KC-97 aerial tankers, refueling
B-47 jet bombers in flight. The reason for the weird effect that startled so
many Southern Californians was that when the refueling is taking place a
floodlight on the bottom of the tanker airplane lights up the bomber that is
being refueled. The airplanes were flying high, and slowly, so no sound was
heard; only the bright floodlights could be seen. Since most people, even
other pilots, have never seen a night aerial refueling operation and could not
identify the odd lights they saw, the lights became UFO's.

In other instances common everyday objects look like UFO's because of
some odd quirk in the human mind. A star or planet that has been in the sky
every day of the observer's life suddenly "takes off at high speed on a
highly erratic flight path." Or a vapor trail from a high-flying jet—seen a
hundred times before by the observer—becomes a flying saucer.

Some psychologists explain such aberrations as being akin to the crowd
behavior mechanism at work in the "bobby-sox craze." Teen-agers don't
know why they squeal and swoon when their current fetish sways and
croons. Yet everybody else is squealing, so they squeal too. Maybe that
great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: "Everybody wants to get
into the act." I am convinced that a certain percentage of UFO reports come
from people who see flying saucers because others report seeing them.

But this "will to see" may have deeper roots, almost religious
implications, for some people. Consciously or unconsciously, they want
UFO's to be real and to come from outer space. These individuals,
frightened perhaps by threats of atomic destruction, or lesser fears—who
knows what—act as if nothing that men can do can save the earth. Instead,
they seek salvation from outer space, on the forlorn premise that flying
saucer men, by their very existence, are wiser and more advanced than we.
Such people may reason that a race of men capable of interplanetary travel
have lived well into, or through, an atomic age. They have survived and
they can tell us their secret of survival. Maybe the threat of an atomic war
unified their planet and allowed them to divert their war effort to one of
social and technical advancement. To such people a searchlight on a cloud
or a bright star is an interplanetary spaceship.

If all the UFO reports that the Air Force has received in the past eight
years could be put in this "psychological quirk" category, Project Blue Book
would never have been organized. It is another class of reports that causes

the Air Force to remain interested in UFO's. This class of reports are called
"Unknowns."

In determining the identity of a UFO, the project based its method of
operation on a well-known psychological premise. This premise is that to
get a reaction from one of the senses there must be a stimulus. If you think
you see a UFO you must have seen something. Pure hallucinations are
extremely rare.

For anything flying in the air the stimulus could be anything that is
normally seen in the air. Balloons, airplanes, and astronomical bodies are
the commoner stimuli. Birds and insects are common also, but usually are
seen at such close range that they are nearly always recognized.
Infrequently observed things, such as sundogs, mirages, huge fireballs, and
a host of other unusual flying objects, are also known stimuli.

On Project Blue Book our problem was to identify these stimuli. We had
methods for checking the location, at any time, of every balloon launched
anywhere in the United States. To a certain degree the same was true for
airplanes. The UFO observer's estimate of where the object was located in
the sky helped us to identify astronomical bodies. Huge files of UFO
characteristics, along with up-to-the- minute weather data, and advice from
specialists, permitted us to identify such things as sun-dogs, paper caught in
updrafts, huge meteors, etc.

This determination of the stimuli that triggered UFO sightings, while not
an insurmountable task, was a long, tedious process. The identification of
known objects was routine, and caused no excitement. The excitement and
serious interest occurred when we received UFO reports in which the
observer was reliable and the stimuli could not be identified. These were the
reports that challenged the project and caused me to spend hours briefing
top U.S. officials. These were the reports that we called "Unknowns."

Of the several thousand UFO reports that the Air Force has received
since 1947, some 15 to 20 per cent fall into this category called unknown.
This means that the observer was not affected by any determinable
psychological quirks and that after exhaustive investigation the object that
was reported could not be identified. To be classed as an unknown, a UFO
report also had to be "good," meaning that it had to come from a competent
observer and had to contain a reasonable amount of data.

Reports are often seen in the newspapers that say: "Mrs. Henry Jones, of
5464 South Elm, said that 10:00A.M. she was shaking her dust mop out of
the bedroom window when she saw a flying saucer"; or "Henry Armstrong
was driving between Grundy Center and Rienbeck last night when he saw a
light. Henry thinks it was a flying saucer." This is not a good UFO report.

This type of UFO report, if it was received by Project Blue Book, was
stamped "Insufficient Data for Evaluation" and dropped into the dead file,
where it became a mere statistic.

Next to the "Insufficient Data" file was a file marked "C.P." This meant
crackpot. Into this file went all reports from people who had talked with
flying saucer crews, who had inspected flying saucers that had landed in the
United States, who had ridden in flying saucers, or who were members of
flying saucer crews. By Project Blue Book standards, these were not "good"
UFO reports either.

But here is a "good" UFO report with an "unknown" conclusion:

On July 24, 1952, two Air Force colonels, flying a B-25, took off from
Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco, for Colorado Springs,
Colorado. The day was clear, not a cloud in the sky.

The colonels had crossed the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and
Reno and were flying east at 11,000 feet on "Green 3," the aerial highway
to Salt Lake City. At 3:40P.M. they were over the Carson Sink area of
Nevada, when one of the colonels noticed three objects ahead of them and a
little to their right. The objects looked like three F- 86's flying a tight V
formation. If they were F-86's they should have been lower, according to
civil air regulations, but on a clear day some pilots don't watch their altitude
too closely.

In a matter of seconds the three aircraft were close enough to the B- 25 to
be clearly seen. They were not F-86's. They were three bright silver, delta
wing craft with no tails and no pilot's canopies. The only thing that broke
the sharply defined, clean upper surface of the triangular wing was a
definite ridge that ran from the nose to the tail.

In another second the three deltas made a slight left bank and shot by the
B-25 at terrific speed. The colonels estimated that the speed was at least
three times that of an F-86. They got a good look at the three deltas as the
unusual craft passed within 400 to 800 yards of the B-25.

When they landed at Colorado Springs, the two colonels called the
intelligence people at Air Defense Command Headquarters to make a UFO
report. The suggestion was offered that they might have seen three F- 86's.
The colonels promptly replied that if the objects had been F- 86's they
would have easily been recognized as such. The colonels knew what F-86's
looked like.

Air Defense Command relayed the report to Project Blue Book. An
investigation was started at once.

Flight Service, which clears all military aircraft flights, was contacted
and asked about the location of aircraft near the Carson Sink area at

3:40P.M. They had no record of the presence of aircraft in that area.

Since the colonels had mentioned delta wing aircraft, and both the Air
Force and the Navy had a few of this type, we double-checked. The Navy's
deltas were all on the east coast, at least all of the silver ones were. A few
deltas painted the traditional navy blue were on the west coast, but not near
Carson Sink. The Air Force's one delta was temporarily grounded.

Since balloons once in a while can appear to have an odd shape, all
balloon flights were checked for both standard weather balloons and the big
100-foot-diameter research balloons. Nothing was found.

A quick check on the two colonels revealed that both of them were
command pilots and that each had several thousand hours of flying time.
They were stationed at the Pentagon. Their highly classified assignments
were such that they would be in a position to recognize anything that the
United States knows to be flying anywhere in the world.

Both men had friends who had "seen flying saucers" at some time, but
both had openly voiced their skepticism. Now, from what the colonels said
when they were interviewed after landing at Colorado Springs, they had
changed their opinions.

Nobody knows what the two colonels saw over Carson Sink. However, it
is always possible to speculate. Maybe they just thought they were close
enough to the three objects to see them plainly. The objects might have been
three F-86's: maybe Flight Service lost the records. It could be that the three
F-86's had taken off to fly in the local area of their base but had decided to
do some illegal sight-seeing. Flight Service would have no record of a flight
like this. Maybe both of the colonels had hallucinations.

There is a certain mathematical probability that any one of the above
speculative answers is correct—correct for this one case. If you try this type
of speculation on hundreds of sightings with "unknown" answers, the
probability that the speculative answers are correct rapidly approaches zero.

Maybe the colonels actually did see what they thought they did, a type of
craft completely foreign to them.

Another good UFO report provides an incident in which there is hardly
room for any speculation of this type. The conclusion is more simply,
"Unknown," period.

On January 20, 1952, at seven-twenty in the evening, two master
sergeants, both intelligence specialists, were walking down a street on the
Fairchild Air Force Base, close to Spokane, Washington.

Suddenly both men noticed a large, bluish-white, spherical-shaped object
approaching from the east. They stopped and watched the object carefully,
because several of these UFO's had been reported by pilots from the air
base over the past few months. The sergeants had written up the reports on
these earlier sightings.

The object was traveling at a moderately fast speed on a horizontal path.
As it passed to the north of their position and disappeared in the west, the
sergeants noted that it had a long blue tail. At no time did they hear any
sound. They noted certain landmarks that the object had crossed and
estimated the time taken in passing these landmarks. The next day they
went out and measured the angles between these landmarks in order to
include them in their report.

When we got the report at ATIC, our first reaction was that the master
sergeants had seen a large meteor. From the evidence I had written off, as

meteors, all previous similar UFO reports from this air base.

The sergeants' report, however, contained one bit of information that
completely changed the previous picture. At the time of the sighting there
had been a solid 6,000-foot-thick overcast at 4,700 feet. And meteors don't
go that low.

A few quick calculations gave a rather fantastic answer. If the object was
just at the base of the clouds it would have been 10,000 feet from the two
observers and traveling 1,400 miles per hour.

But regardless of the speed, the story was still fantastic. The object was
no jet airplane because there was no sound. It was not a searchlight because
there were none on the air base. It was not an automobile spotlight because
a spotlight will not produce the type of light the sergeants described. As a
double check, however, both men were questioned on this point. They
stated firmly that they had seen hundreds of searchlights and spotlights
playing on clouds, and that this was not what they saw.

Beyond these limited possibilities the sergeants' UFO discourages fruitful
speculation. The object remains unidentified.

The UFO reports made by the two colonels and the two master sergeants
are typical of hundreds of other good UFO reports which carry the verdict,
"Conclusion unknown."

Some of these UFO reports have been publicized, but many have not.
Very little information pertaining to UFO's was withheld from the press—if
the press knew of the occurrence of specific sightings. Our policy on
releasing information was to answer only direct questions from the press. If
the press didn't know about a given UFO incident, they naturally couldn't
ask questions about it. Consequently such stories were never released. In

other instances, when the particulars of a UFO sighting were released, they
were only the bare facts about what was reported. Any additional
information that might have been developed during later investigations and
analyses was not released.

There is a great deal of interest in UFO's and the interest shows no signs
of diminishing. Since the first flying saucer skipped across the sky in the
summer of 1947, thousands of words on this subject have appeared in every
newspaper and most magazines in the United States. During a six-month
period in 1952 alone 148 of the nation's leading newspapers carried a total
of over 16,000 items about flying saucers.

During July 1952 reports of flying saucers sighted over Washington,
D.C., cheated the Democratic National Convention out of precious headline
space.

The subject of flying saucers, which has generated more unscientific
behavior than any other topic of modern times, has been debated at the
meetings of professional scientific societies, causing scientific tempers to
flare where unemotional objectivity is supposed to reign supreme.

Yet these thousands of written words and millions of spoken words— all
attesting to the general interest—have generated more heat than light. Out
of this avalanche of print and talk, the full, factual, true story of UFO's has
emerged only on rare occasions. The general public, for its interest in
UFO's, has been paid off in misinformation.

Many civilian groups must have sensed this, for while I was chief of
Project Blue Book I had dozens of requests to speak on the subject of
UFO's. These civilian requests had to be turned down because of
security regulations.

I did give many official briefings, however, behind closed doors, to
certain groups associated with the government—all of them upon request.

The subject of UFO's was added to a regular series of intelligence
briefings given to students at the Air Force's Command and Staff School,
and to classes at the Air Force's Intelligence School.

I gave briefings to the technical staff at the Atomic Energy Commission's
Los Alamos laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was built. The theater
where this briefing took place wouldn't hold all of the people who tried to
get in, so the briefing was recorded and replayed many times. The same
thing happened at AEC's Sandia Base, near Albuquerque.

Many groups in the Pentagon and the Office of Naval Research requested
UFO briefings. Civilian groups, made up of some of the nation's top
scientists and industrialists, and formed to study special military problems,
worked in a UFO briefing. Top Air Force commanders were given periodic
briefings.

Every briefing I gave was followed by a discussion that lasted anywhere
from one to four hours.

In addition to these, Project Blue Book published a classified monthly
report on UFO activity. Requests to be put on distribution for this report
were so numerous that the distribution had to be restricted to major Air
Force Command Headquarters.

This interest was not caused by any revolutionary information that was
revealed in the briefings or reports. It stemmed only from a desire to get the
facts about an interesting subject.

Many aspects of the UFO problem were covered in these official
briefings. I would give details of many of the better reports we received, our
conclusions about them, and how those conclusions were reached. If we had
identified a UFO, the audience was told how the identification was made. If
we concluded that the answer to a UFO sighting was "Unknown," the
audience learned why we were convinced it was unknown.

Among the better sightings that were described fully to interested
government groups were: the complete story of the Lubbock Lights,
including the possible sighting of the same V-shaped light formations at
other locations on the same night; the story of a group of scientists who
detected mysterious nuclear radiation when UFO's were sighted; and all of
the facts behind such famous cases as the Mantell Incident, the Florida
scoutmaster who was burned by a "flying saucer," and headline-capturing
sightings at Washington, D.C.

I showed them what few photographs we had, the majority of which
everyone has seen, since they have been widely published in magazines and
newspapers. Our collection of photographs was always a disappointment as
far as positive proof was concerned because, in a sense, if you've seen one
you've seen them all. We had no clear pictures of a saucer, just an
assortment of blurs, blotches, and streaks of light.

The briefings included a description of how Project Blue Book operated
and a survey of the results of the many studies that were made of the mass
of UFO data we had collected. Also covered were our interviews with a
dozen North American astronomers, the story of the unexplained green
fireballs of New Mexico, and an account of how a committee of six
distinguished United States scientists spent many hours attempting to
answer the question, "Are the UFO's from outer space?"

Unfortunately the general public was never able to hear these briefings.
For a long time, contrary to present thinking in military circles, I have
believed that the public also is entitled to know the details of what was
covered in these briefings (less, of course, the few items pertaining to radar
that were classified "Secret," and the names of certain people). But
withholding these will not alter the facts in any way.

A lot has already been written on the subject of UFO's, but none of it
presents the true, complete story. Previous forays into the UFO field have
been based on inadequate information and have been warped to fit the
personal biases of the individual writers. Well meaning though these authors
may be, the degree to which their books have misinformed the public is
incalculable.

It is high time that we let the people know.

The following chapters present the true and complete UFO story, based
on what I learned about UFO's while I was chief of Project Blue Book, the
Air Force's project for the investigation and analysis of UFO reports. Here
is the same information that I gave to Secretary of the Air Force, Thomas K.
Finletter, to the Air Force commanders, to scientists and industrialists. This
is what the Air Force knows about unidentified flying objects.

You may not agree with some of the official ideas or conclusions—
neither did a lot of people I briefed—but this is the story.

CHAPTER TWO

The Era of Confusion Begins

On September 23, 1947, the chief of the Air Technical Intelligence
Center, one of the Air Force's most highly specialized intelligence
units, sent a letter to the Commanding General of the then Army Air
Forces.

The letter was in answer to the Commanding General's verbal request to
make a preliminary study of the reports of unidentified flying objects. The
letter said that after a preliminary study of UFO reports, ATIC concluded
that, to quote from the letter, "the reported phenomena were real." The letter
strongly urged that a permanent project be established at ATIC to
investigate and analyze future UFO reports. It requested a priority for the
project, a registered code name, and an over-all security classification.
ATICs request was granted and Project Sign, the forerunner of Project
Grudge and Project Blue Book, was launched. It was given a 2A priority,
1A being the highest priority an Air Force project could have. With this the
Air Force dipped into the most prolonged and widespread controversy it has
ever, or may ever, encounter. The Air Force grabbed the proverbial bear by
the tail and to this day it hasn't been able to let loose.

The letter to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces from the
chief of ATIC had used the word "phenomena." History has shown that this
was not a too well-chosen word. But on September 23, 1947, when the
letter was written, ATICs intelligence specialists were confident that within
a few months or a year they would have the answer to the question, "What
are UFO's?" The question, "Do UFO's exist?" was never mentioned. The
only problem that confronted the people at ATIC was, "Were the UFO's of
Russian or interplanetary origin?" Either case called for a serious, secrecy-
shrouded project. Only top people at ATIC were assigned to Project Sign.

Although a formal project for UFO investigation wasn't set up until
September 1947, the Air Force had been vitally interested in UFO reports

ever since June 24, 1947, the day Kenneth Arnold made the original UFO
report.

As Arnold's story of what he saw that day has been handed down by the
bards of saucerism, the true facts have been warped, twisted, and changed.
Even some points in Arnold's own account of his sighting as published in
his book, The Coming of the Saucers, do not jibe with what the official files
say he told the Air Force in 1947. Since this incident was the original UFO
sighting, I used to get many inquiries about it from the press and at
briefings. To get the true and accurate story of what did happen to Kenneth
Arnold on June 24, 1947, I had to go back through old newspaper files,
official reports, and talk to people who had worked on Project Sign. By
cross-checking these data and talking to people who had heard Arnold tell
about his UFO sighting soon after it happened, I finally came up with what
I believe is the accurate story.

Arnold had taken off from Chehalis, Washington, intending to fly to
Yakima, Washington. About 3:00P.M. he arrived in the vicinity of Mount
Rainier. There was a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane lost in the Mount
Rainier area, so Arnold decided to fly around awhile and look for it. He was
looking down at the ground when suddenly he noticed a series of bright
flashes off to his left. He looked for the source of the flashes and saw a
string of nine very bright disk- shaped objects, which he estimated to be 45
to 50 feet in length. They were traveling from north to south across the nose
of his airplane. They were flying in a reversed echelon (i.e., lead object high
with the rest stepped down), and as they flew along they weaved in and out
between the mountain peaks, once passing behind one of the peaks. Each
individual object had a skipping motion described by Arnold as a "saucer
skipping across water."

During the time that the objects were in sight, Arnold had clocked their
speed. He had marked his position and their position on the map and again
noted the time. When he landed he sketched in the flight path that the
objects had flown and computed their speed, almost 1,700 miles per hour.
He estimated that they had been 20 to 25 miles away and had traveled 47
miles in 102 seconds.

I found that there was a lot of speculation on this report. Two factions at
ATIC had joined up behind two lines of reasoning. One side said that
Arnold had seen plain, everyday jet airplanes flying in formation. This
side's argument was based on the physical limitations of the human eye,
visual acuity, the eye's ability to see a small, distant object. Tests, they
showed, had proved that a person with normal vision can't "see" an object
that subtends an angle of less than 0.2 second of arc. For example, a
basketball can't be seen at a distance of several miles but if you move the
basketball closer and closer, at some point you will be able to see it. At this
point the angle between the top and bottom of the ball and your eye will be
about 0.2 of a second of arc. This was applied to Arnold's sighting. The
"Arnold-saw-airplanes" faction maintained that since Arnold said that the
objects were 45 to 50 feet long they would have had to be much closer than
he had estimated or he couldn't even have seen them at all. Since they were
much closer than he estimated, Arnold's timed speed was all wrong and
instead of going 1,700 miles per hour the objects were traveling at a speed
closer to 400 miles per hour, the speed of a jet. There was no reason to
believe they weren't jets. The jets appeared to have a skipping motion
because Arnold had looked at them through layers of warm and cold air,
like heat waves coming from a hot pavement that cause an object to
shimmer.

The other side didn't buy this idea at all. They based their argument on
the fact that Arnold knew where the objects were when he timed them.

After all, he was an old mountain pilot and was as familiar with the area
around the Cascade Mountains as he was with his own living room. To
cinch this point the fact that the objects had passed behind a mountain peak
was brought up. This positively established the distance the objects were
from Arnold and confirmed his calculated 1,700-miles-per-hour speed.
Besides, no airplane can weave in and out between mountain peaks in the
short time that Arnold was watching them. The visual acuity factor only
strengthened the "Arnold-saw-a- flying-saucer" faction's theory that what
he'd seen was a spaceship. If he could see the objects 20 to 25 miles away,
they must have been about 210 feet long instead of the poorly estimated 45
to 50 feet.

In 1947 this was a fantastic story, but now it is just another UFO report
marked "Unknown." It is typical in that if the facts are accurate, if Arnold
actually did see the UFO's go behind a mountain peak, and if he knew his
exact position at the time, the UFO problem cannot be lightly sloughed off;
but there are always "ifs" in UFO reports. This is the type of report that led
Major General John A. Samford, Director of Intelligence for Headquarters,
Air Force, to make the following comment during a press conference in
July 1952: "However, there have remained a percentage of this total [of all
UFO reports received by the Air Force], about 20 per cent of the reports,
that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things. We
keep on being concerned about them."

In warping, twisting, and changing the Arnold incident, the writers of
saucer lore haven't been content to confine themselves to the incident itself;
they have dragged in the crashed Marine Corps' C-46. They intimate that
the same flying saucers that Arnold saw shot down the C-46, grabbed up the
bodies of the passengers and crew, and now have them pickled at the
University of Venus Medical School. As proof they apply the same illogical
reasoning that they apply to most everything. The military never released

photos of the bodies of the dead men, therefore there were no bodies. There
were photographs and there were bodies. In consideration of the families of
air crewmen and passengers, photos of air crashes showing dead bodies are
never released.

Arnold himself seems to be the reason for a lot of the excitement that
heralded flying saucers. Stories of odd incidents that occur in this world are
continually being reported by newspapers, but never on the scale of the first
UFO report. Occasional stories of the "Himalayan snowmen," or the
"Malayan monsters," rate only a few inches or a column on the back pages
of newspapers. Arnold's story, if it didn't make the headlines, at least made
the front page. I had the reason for this explained to me one day when I was
investigating a series of UFO reports in California in the spring of 1952.

I was making my headquarters at an air base where a fighter-bomber
wing was stationed. Through a mutual friend I met one of the fighter-
bomber pilots who had known Arnold. In civilian life the pilot was a
newspaper reporter and had worked on the original Arnold story. He told
me that when the story first broke all the newspaper editors in the area were
thoroughly convinced that the incident was a hoax, and that they intended to
write the story as such. The more they dug into the facts, however, and into
Arnold's reputation, the more it appeared that he was telling the truth.
Besides having an unquestionable character, he was an excellent mountain
pilot, and mountain pilots are a breed of men who know every nook and
cranny of the mountains in their area. The most fantastic part of Arnold's
story had been the 1,700-miles-per-hour speed computed from Arnold's
timing the objects between two landmarks. "When Arnold told us how he
computed the speed," my chance acquaintance told me, "we all put a lot of
faith in his story." He went on to say that when the editors found out that
they were wrong about the hoax, they did a complete about-face, and were
very much impressed by the story. This enthusiasm spread, and since the

Air Force so quickly denied ownership of the objects, all of the facts built
up into a story so unique that papers all over the world gave it front-page
space.

There was an old theory that maybe Arnold had seen wind whipping
snow along the mountain ridges, so I asked about this. I got a flat
"Impossible." My expert on the early Arnold era said, "I've lived in the
Pacific Northwest many years and have flown in the area for hundreds of
hours. It's impossible to get powder snow low in the mountains in June.
Personally, I believe Arnold saw some kind of aircraft and they weren't
from this earth." He went on to tell me about two other very similar
sightings that had happened the day after Arnold saw the nine disks. He
knew the people who made these sightings and said that they weren't the
kind to go off "half cocked." He offered to get a T-6 and fly me up to Boise
to talk to them since they had never made a report to the military, but I had
to return to Dayton so I declined.

Within a few days of Arnold's sighting, others began to come in. On
June 28 an Air Force pilot in an F-51 was flying near Lake Mead,
Nevada, when he saw a formation of five or six circular objects off
his right wing. This was about three-fifteen in the afternoon.

That night at nine-twenty, four Air Force officers, two pilots, and two
intelligence officers from Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, saw a
bright light traveling across the sky. It was first seen just above the horizon,
and as it traveled toward the observers it "zigzagged," with bursts of high
speed. When it was directly overhead it made a sharp 90-degree turn and
was lost from view as it traveled south.

Other reports came in. In Milwaukee a lady saw ten go over her house
"like blue blazes," heading south. A school bus driver in Clarion, Iowa, saw
an object streak across the sky. In a few seconds twelve more followed the

first one. White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico chalked up the first
of the many sightings that this location would produce when several people
riding in an automobile saw a pulsating light travel from horizon to horizon
in thirty seconds. A Chicago housewife saw one "with legs."

The week of July 4, 1947, set a record for reports that was not broken
until 1952. The center of activity was the Portland, Oregon, area. At
11:00A.M. a carload of people driving near Redmond saw four disk-shaped
objects streaking past Mount Jefferson. At 1:05P.M. a policeman was in the
parking lot behind the Portland City Police Headquarters when he noticed
some pigeons suddenly began to flutter around as if they were scared. He
looked up and saw five large disk- shaped objects, two going south and
three going east. They were traveling at a high rate of speed and seemed to
be oscillating about their lateral axis. Minutes later two other policemen,
both ex- pilots, reported three of the same things flying in trail. Before long
the harbor patrol called into headquarters. A crew of four patrolmen had
seen three to six of the disks, "shaped like chrome hub caps," traveling very
fast. They also oscillated as they flew. Then the citizens of Portland began
to see them. A man saw one going east and two going north. At four-thirty a
woman called in and had just seen one that looked like "a new dime
flipping around." Another man reported two, one going southeast, one
northeast. From Milwaukie, Oregon, three were reported going northwest.
In Vancouver, Washington, sheriff's deputies saw twenty to thirty.

The first photo was taken on July 4 in Seattle. After much publicity it
turned out to be a weather balloon.

That night a United Airlines crew flying near Emmett, Idaho, saw five.
The pilot's report read:

Five "somethings," which were thin and smooth on the bottom and
rough-appearing on top, were seen silhouetted against the sunset shortly

after the plane took off from Boise at 8:04P.M. We saw them clearly. We
followed them in a northeasterly direction for about 45 miles. They finally
disappeared. We were unable to tell whether they outsped us or
disintegrated. We can't say whether they were "smearlike," oval, or anything
else but whatever they were they were not aircraft, clouds or smoke.

Civilians did not have a corner on the market. On July 6 a staff sergeant
in Birmingham, Alabama, saw several "dim, glowing lights" speeding
across the sky and photographed one of them. Also on the sixth the crew of
an Air Force B-25 saw a bright, disk-shaped object "low at nine o'clock."
This is one of the few reports of an object lower than the aircraft. At
Fairfield-Suisun AFB in California a pilot saw something travel three
quarters of the way across the sky in a few seconds. It, too, was oscillating
on its lateral axis.

According to the old hands at ATIC, the first sighting that really made the
Air Force take a deep interest in UFO's occurred on July 8 at Muroc Air
Base (now Edwards AFB), the supersecret Air Force test center in the
Mojave Desert of California. At 10:10A.M. a test pilot was running up the
engine of the then new XP-84 in preparation for a test flight. He happened
to look up and to the north he saw what first appeared to be a weather
balloon traveling in a westerly direction. After watching it a few seconds,
he changed his mind. He had been briefed on the high-altitude winds, and
the object he saw was going against the wind. Had it been the size of a
normal aircraft, the test pilot estimated that it would have been at 10,000 to
12,000 feet and traveling 200 to 225 miles per hour. He described the object
as being spherically shaped and yellowish white in color.

Ten minutes before this several other officers and airmen had seen three
objects. They were similar except they had more of a silver color. They
were also heading in a westerly direction.

Two hours later a crew of technicians on Rogers Dry Lake, adjacent to
Muroc Air Base, observed another UFO. Their report went as follows:

On the 8 July 1947 at 11:50 we were sitting in an observation truck
located in Area #3, Rogers Dry Lake. We were gazing upward toward a
formation of two P-82's and an A-26 aircraft flying at 20,000 feet. They
were preparing to carry out a seat-ejection experiment. We observed a
round object, white aluminum color, which at first resembled a parachute
canopy. Our first impression was that a premature ejection of the seat and
dummy had occurred but this was not the case. The object was lower than
20,000 feet, and was falling at three times the rate observed for the test
parachute, which ejected thirty seconds after we first saw the object. As the
object fell it drifted slightly north of due west against the prevailing wind.
The speed, horizontal motion, could not be determined, but it appeared to
be slower than the maximum velocity F-80 aircraft.

As this object descended through a low enough level to permit
observation of its lateral silhouette, it presented a distinct oval- shaped
outline, with two projections on the upper surface which might have been
thick fins or nobs. These crossed each other at intervals, suggesting either
rotation or oscillation of slow type.

No smoke, flames, propeller arcs, engine noise, or other plausible or
visible means of propulsion were noted. The color was silver, resembling an
aluminum-painted fabric, and did not appear as dense as a parachute
canopy.

When the object dropped to a level such that it came into line of vision of
the mountain tops, it was lost to the vision of the observers.

It is estimated that the object was in sight about 90 seconds. Of the five
people sitting in the observation truck, four observed this object.

The following is our opinion about this object:

It was man-made, as evidenced by the outline and functional appearance.

Seeing this was not a hallucination or other fancies of sense.

Exactly four hours later the pilot of an F-51 was flying at 20,000 feet
about 40 miles south of Muroc Air Base when he sighted a "flat object of a
light-reflecting nature." He reported that it had no vertical fin or wings.
When he first saw it, the object was above him and he tried to climb up to
it, but his F-51 would not climb high enough. All air bases in the area were
contacted but they had no aircraft in the area.

By the end of July 1947 the UFO security lid was down tight. The few
members of the press who did inquire about what the Air Force was doing
got the same treatment that you would get today if you inquired about the
number of thermonuclear weapons stock-piled in the U.S.'s atomic arsenal.
No one, outside of a few high-ranking officers in the Pentagon, knew what
the people in the barbed-wire enclosed Quonset huts that housed the Air
Technical Intelligence Center were thinking or doing.

The memos and correspondence that Project Blue Book inherited from
the old UFO projects told the story of the early flying saucer era. These
memos and pieces of correspondence showed that the UFO situation was
considered to be serious; in fact, very serious. The paper work of that period
also indicated the confusion that surrounded the investigation; confusion
almost to the point of panic. The brass wanted an answer, quickly, and
people were taking off in all directions. Everyone's theory was as good as
the next and each person with any weight at ATIC was plugging and
investigating his own theory. The ideas as to the origin of the UFO's fell
into two main categories, earthly and non-earthly. In the earthly category
the Russians led, with the U.S. Navy and their XF-5-U-1, the "Flying

Flapjack," pulling a not too close second. The desire to cover all leads was
graphically pointed up to be a personal handwritten note I found in a file. It
was from ATIC's chief to a civilian intelligence specialist. It said, "Are you
positive that the Navy junked the XF-5- U-1 project?" The non-earthly
category ran the gamut of theories, with space animals trailing
interplanetary craft about the same distance the Navy was behind the
Russians.

This confused speculating lasted only a few weeks. Then the
investigation narrowed down to the Soviets and took off on a much more
methodical course of action.

When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of
aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority of these
projects were in the most preliminary stages but they were the only known
craft that could even approach the performance of the objects reported by
UFO observers. Like the Allies, after World War II the Soviets had obtained
complete sets of data on the latest German developments. This, coupled
with rumors that the Soviets were frantically developing the German ideas,
caused no small degree of alarm. As more UFO's were observed near the
Air Force's Muroc Test Center, the Army's White Sands Proving Ground,
and atomic bomb plants, ATIC's efforts became more concentrated.

Wires were sent to intelligence agents in Germany requesting that they
find out exactly how much progress had been made on the various German
projects.

The last possibility, of course, was that the Soviets had discovered some
completely new aerodynamic concept that would give saucer performance.

While ATIC technical analysts were scouring the United States for data
on the German projects and the intelligence agents in Germany were

seeking out the data they had been asked for, UFO reports continued to
flood the country. The Pacific Northwest still led with the most sightings,
but every state in the Union was reporting a few flying saucers.

At first there was no co-ordinated effort to collect data on the UFO
reports. Leads would come from radio reports or newspaper items. Military
intelligence agencies outside of ATIC were hesitant to investigate on their
own initiative because, as is so typical of the military, they lacked specific
orders. When no orders were forthcoming, they took this to mean that the
military had no interest in the UFO's. But before long this placid attitude
changed, and changed drastically. Classified orders came down to
investigate all UFO sightings. Get every detail and send it direct to ATIC at
Wright Field. The order carried no explanation as to why the information
was wanted. This lack of an explanation and the fact that the information
was to be sent directly to a high-powered intelligence group within Air
Force Headquarters stirred the imagination of every potential cloak-and-
dagger man in the military intelligence system. Intelligence people in the
field who had previously been free with opinions now clammed up tight.

The era of confusion was progressing.

Early statements to the press, which shaped the opinion of the public,
didn't reduce the confusion factor. While ATIC was grimly expending
maximum effort in a serious study, "certain high-placed officials" were
officially chuckling at the mention of UFO's.

In July 1947 an International News Service wire story quoted the public
relations officer at Wright Field as saying, "So far we haven't found
anything to confirm that saucers exist. We don't think they are guided
missiles." He went on to say, "As things are now, they appear to be either a
phenomenon or a figment of somebody's imagination."

A few weeks later a lieutenant colonel who was Assistant to the Chief of
Staff of the Fourth Air Force was widely quoted as saying, "There is no
basis for belief in flying saucers in the Tacoma area [referring to a UFO
sighting in the area of Tacoma, Washington], or any other area."

The "experts," in their stories of saucer lore, have said that these brush-
offs of the UFO sightings were intentional smoke screens to cover the facts
by adding confusion. This is not true; it was merely a lack of coordination.
But had the Air Force tried to throw up a screen of confusion, they couldn't
have done a better job.

When the lieutenant colonel from the Fourth Air Force made his widely
publicized denunciation of saucer believers he specifically mentioned a
UFO report from the Tacoma, Washington, area.

The report of the investigation of this incident, the Maury Island Mystery,
was one of the most detailed reports of the early UFO era. The report that
we had in our files had been pieced together by Air Force Intelligence and
other agencies because the two intelligence officers who started the
investigation couldn't finish it. They were dead.

For the Air Force the story started on July 31, 1947, when Lieutenant
Frank Brown, an intelligence agent at Hamilton AFB, California, received a
long-distance phone call. The caller was a man whom 111 call Simpson,
who had met Brown when Brown investigated an earlier UFO sighting, and
he had a hot lead on another UFO incident. He had just talked to two
Tacoma Harbor patrolmen. One of them had seen six UFO's hover over his
patrol boat and spew out chunks of odd metal. Simpson had some of the
pieces of the metal.

The story sounded good to Lieutenant Brown, so he reported it to his
chief. His chief OK'd a trip and within an hour Lieutenant Brown and

Captain Davidson were flying to Tacoma in an Air Force B-25. When they
arrived they met Simpson and an airline pilot friend of his in Simpson's
hotel room. After the usual round of introductions Simpson told Brown and
Davidson that he had received a letter from a Chicago publisher asking him,
Simpson, to investigate this case. The publisher had paid him $200 and
wanted an exclusive on the story, but things were getting too hot, Simpson
wanted the military to take over.

Simpson went on to say that he had heard about the experience off Maury
Island but that he wanted Brown and Davidson to hear it firsthand. He had
called the two harbor patrolmen and they were on their way to the hotel.
They arrived and they told their story.

I'll call these two men Jackson and Richards although these aren't their
real names. In June 1947, Jackson said, his crew, his son, and the son's dog
were on his patrol boat patrolling near Maury Island, an island in Puget
Sound, about 3 miles from Tacoma. It was a gray day, with a solid cloud
deck down at about 2,500 feet. Suddenly everyone on the boat noticed six
"doughnut-shaped" objects, just under the clouds, headed toward the boat.
They came closer and closer, and when they were about 500 feet over the
boat they stopped. One of the doughnut-shaped objects seemed to be in
trouble as the other five were hovering around it. They were close, and
everybody got a good look. The UFO's were about 100 feet in diameter,
with the "hole in the doughnut" being about 25 feet in diameter. They were
a silver color and made absolutely no noise. Each object had large portholes
around the edge.

As the five UFO's circled the sixth, Jackson recalled, one of them came
in and appeared to make contact with the disabled craft. The two objects
maintained contact for a few minutes, then began to separate. While this
was going on, Jackson was taking photos. Just as they began to separate,

there was a dull "thud" and the next second the UFO began to spew out
sheets of very light metal from the hole in the center. As these were
fluttering to the water, the UFO began to throw out a harder, rocklike
material. Some of it landed on the beach of Maury Island. Jackson took his
crew and headed toward the beach of Maury Island, but not before the boat
was damaged, his son's arm had been injured, and the dog killed. As they
reached the island they looked up and saw that the UFO's were leaving the
area at high speed. The harbor patrolman went on to tell how he scooped up
several chunks of the metal from the beach and boarded the patrol boat. He
tried to use his radio to summon aid, but for some unusual reason the
interference was so bad he couldn't even call the three miles to his
headquarters in Tacoma. When they docked at Tacoma, Jackson got first aid
for his son and then reported to his superior officer, Richards, who, Jackson
added to his story, didn't believe the tale. He didn't believe it until he went
out to the island himself and saw the metal.

Jackson's trouble wasn't over. The next morning a mysterious visitor told
Jackson to forget what he'd seen.

Later that same day the photos were developed. They showed the six
objects, but the film was badly spotted and fogged, as if the film had been
exposed to some kind of radiation.

Then Simpson told about his brush with mysterious callers. He said that
Jackson was not alone as far as mysterious callers were concerned, the
Tacoma newspapers had been getting calls from an anonymous tipster
telling exactly what was going on in Simpson's hotel room. This was a very
curious situation because no one except Simpson, the airline pilot, and the
two harbor patrolmen knew what was taking place. The room had even
been thoroughly searched for hidden microphones.

That is the way the story stood a few hours after Lieutenant Brown and
Captain Davidson arrived in Tacoma.

After asking Jackson and Richards a few questions, the two intelligence
agents left, reluctant even to take any of the fragments. As some writers
who have since written about this incident have said, Brown and Davidson
seemed to be anxious to leave and afraid to touch the fragments of the UFO,
as if they knew something more about them. The two officers went to
McChord AFB, near Tacoma, where their B-25 was parked, held a
conference with the intelligence officer at McChord, and took off for their
home base, Hamilton. When they left McChord they had a good idea as to
the identity of the UFO's. Fortunately they told the McChord intelligence
officer what they had determined from their interview.

In a few hours the two officers were dead. The B-25 crashed near Kelso,
Washington. The crew chief and a passenger had parachuted to safety. The
newspapers hinted that the airplane was sabotaged and that it was carrying
highly classified material. Authorities at McChord AFB confirmed this
latter point, the airplane was carrying classified material.

In a few days the newspaper publicity on the crash died down, and the
Maury Island Mystery was never publicly solved.

Later reports say that the two harbor patrolmen mysteriously disappeared
soon after the fatal crash.

They should have disappeared, into Puget Sound. The whole Maury
Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and the
dirtiest hoax in the UFO history. One passage in the detailed official report
of the Maury Island Mystery says:

Both ——— (the two harbor patrolmen) admitted that the rock fragments
had nothing to do with flying saucers. The whole thing was a hoax. They
had sent in the rock fragments [to a magazine publisher] as a joke. ———
One of the patrolmen wrote to ——— [the publisher] stating that the rock
could have been part of a flying saucer. He had said the rock came from a
flying saucer because that's what ——— [the publisher] wanted him to say.

The publisher, mentioned above, who, one of the two hoaxers said,
wanted him to say that the rock fragments had come from a flying saucer, is
the same one who paid the man I called Simpson $200 to investigate the
case.

The report goes on to explain more details of the incident. Neither one of
the two men could ever produce the photos. They "misplaced" them, they
said. One of them, I forget which, was the mysterious informer who called
the newspapers to report the conversations that were going on in the hotel
room. Jackson's mysterious visitor didn't exist. Neither of the men was a
harbor patrolman, they merely owned a couple of beat-up old boats that
they used to salvage floating lumber from Puget Sound. The airplane crash
was one of those unfortunate things. An engine caught on fire, burned off,
and just before the two pilots could get out, the wing and tail tore off,
making it impossible for them to escape. The two dead officers from
Hamilton AFB smelled a hoax, accounting for their short interview and
hesitancy in bothering to take the "fragments." They confirmed their
convictions when they talked to the intelligence officer at McChord. It had
already been established, through an informer, that the fragments were what
Brown and Davidson thought, slag. The classified material on the B-25 was
a file of reports the two officers offered to take back to Hamilton and had
nothing to do with the Maury Island Mystery, or better, the Maury Island
Hoax.

Simpson and his airline pilot friend weren't told about the hoax for one
reason. As soon as it was discovered that they had been "taken," thoroughly,
and were not a party to the hoax, no one wanted to embarrass them.

The majority of the writers of saucer lore have played this sighting to the
hilt, pointing out as their main premise the fact that the story must be true
because the government never openly exposed or prosecuted either of the
two hoaxers. This is a logical premise, but a false one. The reason for the
thorough investigation of the Maury Island Hoax was that the government
had thought seriously of prosecuting the men. At the last minute it was
decided, after talking to the two men, that the hoax was a harmless joke that
had mushroomed, and that the loss of two lives and a B-25 could not be
directly blamed on the two men. The story wasn't even printed because at
the time of the incident, even though in this case the press knew about it,
the facts were classed as evidence. By the time the facts were released they
were yesterday's news. And nothing is deader than yesterday's news.

As 1947 drew to a close, the Air Force's Project Sign had outgrown its
initial panic and had settled down to a routine operation. Every intelligence
report dealing with the Germans' World War II aeronautical research had
been studied to find out if the Russians could have developed any of the late
German designs into flying saucers. Aerodynamicists at ATIC and at Wright
Field's Aircraft Laboratory computed the maximum performance that could
be expected from the German designs. The designers of the aircraft
themselves were contacted. "Could the Russians develop a flying saucer
from their designs?" The answer was, "No, there was no conceivable way
any aircraft could perform that would match the reported maneuvers of the
UFO's." The Air Force's Aeromedical Laboratory concurred. If the aircraft
could be built, the human body couldn't stand the violent maneuvers that
were reported. The aircraft-structures people seconded this, no material

known could stand the loads of the reported maneuvers and heat of the high
speeds.

Still convinced that the UFO's were real objects, the people at ATIC
began to change their thinking. Those who were convinced that the UFO's
were of Soviet origin now began to eye outer space, not because there was
any evidence that the UFO's did come from outer space but because they
were convinced that UFO's existed and only some unknown race with a
highly developed state of technology could build such vehicles. As far as
the effect on the human body was concerned, why couldn't these people,
whoever they might be, stand these horrible maneuver forces? Why judge
them by earthly standards? I found a memo to this effect was in the old
Project Sign files.

Project Sign ended 1947 with a new problem. How do you collect
interplanetary intelligence? During World War II the organization that was
ATIC's forerunner, the Air Materiel Command's secret "T-2," had developed
highly effective means of wringing out every possible bit of information
about the technical aspects of enemy aircraft. ATIC knew these methods,
but how could this be applied to spaceships? The problem was tackled with
organized confusion.

If the confusion in the minds of Air Force people was organized the
confusion in the minds of the public was not. Publicized statements
regarding the UFO were conflicting.

A widely printed newspaper release, quoting an unnamed Air Force
official in the Pentagon, said:

The "flying saucers" are one of three things:

Solar reflections on low-hanging clouds.

Small meteors that break up, their crystals catching the rays of the sun.

Icing conditions could have formed large hailstones and they might have
flattened out and glided.

A follow-up, which quoted several scientists, said in essence that the
unnamed Air Force official was crazy. Nobody even heard of crystallized
meteors, or huge, flat hailstones, and the solar- reflection theory was
absurd.

Life, Time, Newsweek, and many other news magazines carried articles
about the UFO's. Some were written with tongue in cheek, others were not.
All the articles mentioned the Air Force's mass- hysterical induced
hallucinations. But a Veterans' Administration psychiatrist publicly pooh-
poohed this. "Too many people are seeing things," he said.

It was widely suggested that all the UFO's were meteors. Two Chicago
astronomers queered this. Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the University of
Chicago observatory, was quoted as flatly saying the UFO's couldn't be
meteors. "They are probably man-made," he told the Associated Press. Dr.
Oliver Lee, director of Northwestern University's observatory, agreed with
Dr. Kuiper and he threw in an additional confusion factor that had been in
the back of many people's minds. Maybe they were our own aircraft.

The government had been denying that UFO's belonged to the U.S. from
the first, but Dr. Vannevar Bush, the world-famous scientist, and Dr.
Merle Tuve, inventor of the proximity fuse, added their weight.
"Impossible," they said.

All of this time unnamed Air Force officials were disclaiming serious
interest in the UFO subject. Yet every time a newspaper reporter went out to
interview a person who had seen a UFO, intelligence agents had already

been flown in, gotten the detailed story complete with sketches of the UFO,
and sped back to their base to send the report to Project Sign. Many people
had supposedly been "warned" not to talk too much. The Air Force was
mighty interested in hallucinations.

Thus 1947 ended with various-sized question marks in the mind of the
public. If you followed flying saucers closely the question mark was big, if
you just noted the UFO story titles in the papers it was smaller, but it was
there and it was growing. Probably none of the people, military or civilian,
who had made the public statements were at all qualified to do so but they
had done it, their comments had been printed, and their comments had been
read. Their comments formed the question mark.

CHAPTER THREE

The Classics

1948 was only one hour and twenty-five minutes old when a gentleman
from Abilene, Texas, made the first UFO report of the year. What he saw, "a
fan-shaped glow" in the sky, was insignificant as far as UFO reports go, but
it ushered in a year that was to bring feverish activity to Project Sign.

With the Soviets practically eliminated as a UFO source, the idea of
interplanetary spaceships was becoming more popular. During 1948 the
people in ATIC were openly discussing the possibility of interplanetary
visitors without others tapping their heads and looking smug. During 1948
the novelty of UFO's had worn off for the press and every John and Jane
Doe who saw one didn't make the front pages as in 1947. Editors were
becoming hardened, only a few of the best reports got any space. Only "The
Classics" rated headlines. "The Classics" were three historic reports that

were the highlights of 1948. They are called "The Classics," a name given
them by the Project Blue Book staff, because: (1) they are classic examples
of how the true facts of a UFO report can be twisted and warped by some
writers to prove their point, (2) they are the most highly publicized reports
of this early era of the UFO's, and (3) they "proved" to ATIC's intelligence
specialists that UFO's were real.

The apparent lack of interest in UFO reports by the press was not a true
indication of the situation. I later found out, from talking to writers, that all
during 1948 the interest in UFO's was running high. The Air Force Press
Desk in the Pentagon was continually being asked what progress was being
made in the UFO investigation. The answer was, "Give us time. This job
can't be done in a week." The press respected this and was giving them
time. But every writer worth his salt has contacts, those "usually reliable
sources" you read about, and these contacts were talking. All during 1948
contacts in the Pentagon were telling how UFO reports were rolling in at
the rate of several per day and how ATIC UFO investigation teams were
flying out of Dayton to investigate them. They were telling how another Air
Force investigative organization had been called in to lighten ATIC's load
and allow ATIC to concentrate on the analysis of the reports. The writers
knew this was true because they had crossed paths with these men whom
they had mistakenly identified as FBI agents. The FBI was never officially
interested in UFO sightings. The writers' contacts in the airline industry told
about the UFO talk from V.P.'s down to the ramp boys. Dozens of good,
solid, reliable, experienced airline pilots were seeing UFO's. All of this led
to one conclusion: whatever the Air Force had to say, when it was ready to
talk, would be newsworthy. But the Air Force wasn't ready to talk.

Project Sign personnel were just getting settled down to work after the
New Year's holiday when the "ghost rockets" came back to the
Scandinavian countries of Europe. Air attaches in Sweden, Denmark, and

Norway fired wires to ATIC telling about the reports. Wires went back
asking for more information.

The "ghost rockets," so tagged by the newspapers, had first been seen in
the summer of 1946, a year before the first UFO sighting in the U.S. There
were many different descriptions for the reported objects. They were
usually seen in the hours of darkness and almost always traveling at
extremely high speeds. They were shaped like a ball or projectile, were a
bright green, white, red, or yellow and sometimes made sounds. Like their
American cousins, they were always so far away that no details could be
seen. For no good reason, other than speculation and circulation, the
newspapers had soon begun to refer authoritatively to these "ghost rockets"
as guided missiles, and implied that they were from Russia. Peenemunde,
the great German missile development center and birthplace of the V-l and
V-2 guided missiles, came in for its share of suspicion since it was held by
the Russians. By the end of the summer of 1946 the reports were
widespread, coming from Denmark, Norway, Spain, Greece, French
Morocco, Portugal, and Turkey. In 1947, after no definite conclusions as to
identity of the "rockets" had been established, the reports died out. Now in
early January 1948 they broke out again. But Project Sign personnel were
too busy to worry about European UFO reports, they were busy at home. A
National Guard pilot had just been killed chasing a UFO.

On January 7 all of the late papers in the U.S. carried headlines
similar to those in the Louisville Courier: "F-51 and Capt. Mantell
Destroyed Chasing Flying Saucer." This was Volume I of "The
Classics," the Mantell Incident.

At one-fifteen on that afternoon the control tower operators at Godman
AFB, outside Louisville, Kentucky, received a telephone call from the
Kentucky State Highway Patrol. The patrol wanted to know if Godman

Tower knew anything about any unusual aircraft in the vicinity. Several
people from Maysville, Kentucky, a small town 80 miles east of Louisville,
had reported seeing a strange aircraft. Godman knew that they had nothing
in the vicinity so they called Flight Service at Wright-Patterson AFB. In a
few minutes Flight Service called back. Their air Traffic control board
showed no flights in the area. About twenty minutes later the state police
called again. This time people from the towns of Owensboro and Irvington,
Kentucky, west of Louisville, were reporting a strange craft. The report
from these two towns was a little more complete. The townspeople had
described the object to the state police as being "circular, about 250 to 300
feet in diameter," and moving westward at a "pretty good clip." Godman
Tower checked Flight Service again. Nothing. All this time the tower
operators had been looking for the reported object. They theorized that
since the UFO had had to pass north of Godman to get from Maysville to
Owensboro it might come back.

At one forty-five they saw it, or something like it. Later, in his official
report, the assistant tower operator said that he had seen the object for
several minutes before he called his chiefs attention to it. He said that he
had been reluctant to "make a flying saucer report." As soon as the two men
in the tower had assured themselves that the UFO they saw was not an
airplane or a weather balloon, they called Flight Operations. They wanted
the operations officer to see the UFO. Before long word of the sighting had
gotten around to key personnel on the base, and several officers, besides the
base operations officer and the base intelligence officer, were in the tower.
All of them looked at the UFO through the tower's 6 x 50 binoculars and
decided they couldn't identify it. About this time Colonel Hix, the base
commander, arrived. He looked and he was baffled. At two-thirty, they
reported, they were discussing what should be done when four F-51's came
into view, approaching the base from the south.

The tower called the flight leader, Captain Mantell, and asked him to take
a look at the object and try to identify it. One F-51 in the flight was running
low on fuel, so he asked permission to go on to his base. Mantell took his
two remaining wing men, made a turn, and started after the UFO. The
people in Godman Tower were directing him as none of the pilots could see
the object at this time. They gave Mantell an initial heading toward the
south and the flight was last seen heading in the general direction of the
UFO.

By the time the F-51's had climbed to 10,000 feet, the two wing men later
reported, Mantell had pulled out ahead of them and they could just barely
see him. At two forty-five Mantell called the tower and said, "I see
something above and ahead of me and I'm still climbing." All the people in
the tower heard Mantell say this and they heard one of the wing men call
back and ask, "What the hell are we looking for?" The tower immediately
called Mantell and asked him for a description of what he saw. Odd as it
may seem, no one can remember exactly what he answered. Saucer
historians have credited him with saying, "I've sighted the thing. It looks
metallic and it's tremendous in size. . . . Now it's starting to climb." Then in
a few seconds he is supposed to have called and said, "It's above me and I'm
gaining on it. I'm going to 20,000 feet." Everyone in the tower agreed on
this one last bit of the transmission, "I'm going to 20,000 feet," but didn't
agree on the first part, about the UFO's being metallic and tremendous.

The two wing men were now at 15,000 feet and trying frantically to call
Mantell. He had climbed far above them by this time and was out of sight.
Since none of them had any oxygen they were worried about Mantell. Their
calls were not answered. Mantell never talked to anyone again. The two
wing men leveled off at 15,000 feet, made another fruitless effort to call
Mantell, and started to come back down. As they passed Godman Tower on

their way to their base, one of them said something to the effect that all he
had seen was a reflection on his canopy.

When they landed at their base, Standiford Field, just north of Godman,
one pilot had his F-51 refueled and serviced with oxygen, and took off to
search the area again. He didn't see anything.

At three-fifty the tower lost sight of the UFO. A few minutes later they
got word that Mantell had crashed and was dead.

Several hours later, at 7:20P.M., airfield towers all over the Midwest sent
in frantic reports of another UFO. In all about a dozen airfield towers
reported the UFO as being low on the southwestern horizon and
disappearing after about twenty minutes. The writers of saucer lore say this
UFO was what Mantell was chasing when he died; the Air Force says this
UFO was Venus.

The people on Project Sign worked fast on the Mantell Incident.
Contemplating a flood of queries from the press as soon as they heard about
the crash, they realized that they had to get a quick answer. Venus had been
the target of a chase by an Air Force F-51 several weeks before and there
were similarities between this sighting and the Mantell Incident. So almost
before the rescue crews had reached the crash, the word "Venus" went out.
This satisfied the editors, and so it stood for about a year; Mantell had
unfortunately been killed trying to reach the planet Venus.

To the press, the nonchalant, offhand manner with which the sighting was
written off by the Air Force public relations officer showed great
confidence in the conclusion, Venus, but behind the barbed-wire fence that
encircled ATIC the nonchalant attitude didn't exist among the intelligence
analysts. One man had already left for Louisville and the rest were doing
some tall speculating. The story about the tower-to-air talk. "It looks

metallic and it's tremendous in size," spread fast. Rumor had it that the
tower had carried on a running conversation with the pilots and that there
was more information than was so far known. Rumor also had it that this
conversation had been recorded. Unfortunately neither of these rumors was
true.

Over a period of several weeks the file on the Mantell Incident grew in
size until it was the most thoroughly investigated sighting of that time, at
least the file was the thickest.

About a year later the Air Force released its official report on the
incident. To use a trite term, it was a masterpiece in the art of "weasel
wording." It said that the UFO might have been Venus or it could have been
a balloon. Maybe two balloons. It probably was Venus except that this is
doubtful because Venus was too dim to be seen in the afternoon. This jolted
writers who had been following the UFO story. Only a few weeks before,
The Saturday Evening Post had published a two-part story entitled "What
You Can Believe about Flying Saucers." The story had official sanction and
had quoted the Venus theory as a positive solution. To clear up the situation,
several writers were allowed to interview a major in the Pentagon, who was
the Air Force's Pentagon "expert" on UFO's. The major was asked directly
about the conclusion of the Mantell Incident, and he flatly stated that it was
Venus. The writers pointed out the official Air Force analysis. The major's
answer was, "They checked again and it was Venus." He didn't know who
"they" were, where they had checked, or what they had checked, but it was
Venus. The writers then asked, "If there was a later report they had made
why wasn't it used as a conclusion?" "Was it available?" The answer to the
last question was "No," and the lid snapped back down. This interview gave
the definite impression that the Air Force was unsuccessfully trying to cover
up some very important information, using Venus as a front. Nothing
excites a newspaper or magazine writer more than to think he has stumbled

onto a big story and that someone is trying to cover it up. Many writers
thought this after the interview with the major, and many still think it. You
can't really blame them, either.

In early 1952 I got a telephone call on ATIC's direct line to the Pentagon.
It was a colonel in the Director of Intelligence's office. The Office of Public
Information had been getting a number of queries about all of the confusion
over the Mantell Incident. What was the answer?

I dug out the file. In 1949 all of the original material on the incident had
been microfilmed, but something had been spilled on the film. Many
sections were so badly faded they were illegible. As I had to do with many
of the older sightings that were now history, I collected what I could from
the file, filling in the blanks by talking to people who had been at ATIC
during the early UFO era. Many of these people were still around, "Red"
Honnacker, George Towles, Al Deyarmond, Nick Post, and many others.
Most of them were civilians, the military had been transferred out by this
time.

Some of the press clippings in the file mentioned the Pentagon major and
his concrete proof of Venus. I couldn't find this concrete proof in the file so
I asked around about the major. The major, I found, was an officer in the
Pentagon who had at one time written a short intelligence summary about
UFO's. He had never been stationed at ATIC, nor was he especially well
versed on the UFO problem. When the word of the press conference
regarding the Mantell Incident came down, a UFO expert was needed. The
major, because of his short intelligence summary on UFO's, became the
"expert." He had evidently conjured up "they" and "their later report" to
support his Venus answer because the writers at the press conference had
him in a corner. I looked farther.

Fortunately the man who had done the most extensive work on the
incident, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, head of the Ohio State University Astronomy
Department, could be contacted. I called Dr. Hynek and arranged to meet
him the next day.

Dr. Hynek was one of the most impressive scientists I met while working
on the UFO project, and I met a good many. He didn't do two things that
some of them did: give you the answer before he knew the question; or
immediately begin to expound on his accomplishments in the field of
science. I arrived at Ohio State just before lunch, and Dr. Hynek invited me
to eat with him at the faculty club. He wanted to refer to some notes he had
on the Mantell Incident and they were in his office, so we discussed UFO's
in general during lunch.

Back in his office he started to review the Mantell Incident. He had been
responsible for the weasel-worded report that the Air Force released in late
1949, and he apologized for it. Had he known that it was going to cause so
much confusion, he said, he would have been more specific. He thought the
incident was a dead issue. The reason that Venus had been such a strong
suspect was that it was in almost the same spot in the sky as the UFO. Dr.
Hynek referred to his notes and told me that at 3:00P.M., Venus had been
south southwest of Godman and 33 degrees above the southern horizon. At
3:00P.M. the people in the tower estimated the UFO to be southwest of
Godman and at an elevation of about 45 degrees. Allowing for human error
in estimating directions and angles, this was close. I agreed. There was one
big flaw in the theory, however. Venus wasn't bright enough to be seen. He
had computed the brilliance of the planet, and on the day in question it was
only six times as bright as the surrounding sky. Then he explained what this
meant. Six times may sound like a lot, but it isn't. When you start looking
for a pinpoint of light only six times as bright as the surrounding sky, it's
almost impossible to find it, even on a clear day.

Dr. Hynek said that he didn't think that the UFO was Venus.

I later found out that although it was a relatively clear day there was
considerable haze.

I asked him about some of the other possibilities. He repeated the
balloon, canopy-reflection, and sundog theories but he refused to comment
on them since, as he said, he was an astrophysicist and would care to
comment only on the astrophysical aspects of the sightings.

I drove back to Dayton convinced that the UFO wasn't Venus. Dr. Hynek
had said Venus would have been a pinpoint of light. The people in the tower
had been positive of their descriptions, their statements brought that out.
They couldn't agree on a description, they called the UFO "a parachute,"
"an ice cream cone tipped with red," "round and white," "huge and silver or
metallic," "a small white object," "one fourth the size of the full moon," but
all the descriptions plainly indicated a large object. None of the descriptions
could even vaguely be called a pinpoint of light.

This aspect of a definite shape seemed to eliminate the sundog theory
too. Sundogs, or parhelia, as they are technically known, are caused by ice
particles reflecting a diffused light. This would not give a sharp outline. I
also recalled two instances where Air Force pilots had chased sundogs. In
both instances when the aircraft began to climb, the sundog disappeared.
This was because the angle of reflection changed as the airplane climbed
several thousand feet. These sundog-caused UFO's also had fuzzy edges.

I had always heard a lot of wild speculation about the condition of
Mantell's crashed F-51, so I wired for a copy of the accident report. It
arrived several days after my visit with Dr. Hynek. The report said that the
F-51 had lost a wing due to excessive speed in a dive after Mantell had
"blacked out" due to the lack of oxygen. Mantell's body had not burned, not

disintegrated, and was not full of holes; the wreck was not radioactive, nor
was it magnetized.

One very important and pertinent question remained. Why did Mantell,
an experienced pilot, try to go to 20,000 feet when he didn't even have an
oxygen mask? If he had run out of oxygen, it would have been different
Every pilot and crewman has it pounded into him, "Do not, under any
circumstances, go above 15,000 feet without oxygen." In high-altitude
indoctrination during World War II, I made several trips up to 30,000 feet in
a pressure chamber. To demonstrate anoxia we would leave our oxygen
masks off until we became dizzy. A few of the more hardy souls could get
to 15,000 feet, but nobody ever got over 17,000. Possibly Mantell thought
he could climb up to 20,000 in a hurry and get back down before he got
anoxia and blacked out, but this would be a foolish chance. This point was
covered in the sighting report. A long-time friend of Mantell's went on
record as saying that he'd flown with him several years and knew him
personally. He couldn't conceive of Mantell's even thinking about
disregarding his lack of oxygen. Mantell was one of the most cautious pilots
he knew. "The only thing I can think," he commented, "was that he was
after something that he believed to be more important than his life or his
family."

My next step was to try to find out what Mantell's wing men had seen or
thought but this was a blind alley. All of this evidence was in the ruined
portion of the microfilm, even their names were missing. The only
reference I could find to them was a vague passage indicating they hadn't
seen anything.

I concentrated on the canopy-reflection theory. It is widely believed that
many flying saucers appear to pilots who are actually chasing a reflection
on their canopy. I checked over all the reports we had on file. I couldn't find

one that had been written off for this reason. I dug back into my own flying
experience and talked to a dozen pilots. All of us had momentarily been
startled by a reflection on the aircraft's canopy or wing, but in a second or
two it had been obvious that it was a reflection. Mantell chased the object
for at least fifteen to twenty minutes, and it is inconceivable that he
wouldn't realize in that length of time that he was chasing a reflection.

About the only theory left to check was that the object might have been
one of the big, 100-foot-diameter, "skyhook" balloons. I rechecked the
descriptions of the UFO made by the people in the tower. The first man to
sight the object called it a parachute; others said ice cream cone, round, etc.
All of these descriptions fit a balloon. Buried deep in the file were two more
references to balloons that I had previously missed. Not long after the
object had disappeared from view at Godman AFB, a man from
Madisonville, Kentucky, called Flight Service in Dayton. He had seen an
object traveling southeast. He had looked at it through a telescope and it
was a balloon. At four forty-five an astronomer living north of Nashville,
Tennessee, called in. He had also seen a UFO, looked at it through a
telescope, and it was a balloon.

In the thousands of words of testimony and evidence taken on the
Mantell Incident this was the only reference to balloons. I had purposely not
paid too much attention to this possibility because I was sure that it had
been thoroughly checked back in 1948. Now I wasn't sure.

I talked with one of the people who had been in on the Mantell
investigation. The possibility of a balloon's causing the sighting had been
mentioned but hadn't been followed up for two reasons. Number one was
that everybody at ATIC was convinced that the object Mantell was after was
a spaceship and that this was the only course they had pursued. When the
sighting grew older and no spaceship proof could be found, everybody

jumped on the Venus band wagon, as this theory had "already been
established." It was an easy way out. The second reason was that a quick
check had been made on weather balloons and none were in the area. The
big skyhook balloon project was highly classified at that time, and since
they were all convinced that the object was of interplanetary origin (a
minority wanted to give the Russians credit), they didn't want to bother to
buck the red tape of security to get data on skyhook flights.

The group who supervise the contracts for all the skyhook research
flights for the Air Force are located at Wright Field, so I called them. They
had no records on flights in 1948 but they did think that the big balloons
were being launched from Clinton County AFB in southern Ohio at that
time. They offered to get the records of the winds on January 7 and see
what flight path a balloon launched in southwestern Ohio would have taken.
In a few days they had the data for me.

Unfortunately the times of the first sightings, from the towns outside
Louisville, were not exact but it was possible to partially reconstruct the
sequence of events. The winds were such that a skyhook balloon launched
from Clinton County AFB could be seen from the town east of Godman
AFB, the town from which the first UFO was reported to the Kentucky
State Police. It is not unusual to be able to see a large balloon for 50 to 60
miles. The balloon could have traveled west for a while, climbing as it
moved with the strong east winds that were blowing that day and picking up
speed as the winds got stronger at altitude. In twenty minutes it could have
been in a position where it could be seen from Owensboro and Irvington,
Kentucky, the two towns west of Godman. The second reports to the state
police had come from these two towns. Still climbing, the balloon would
have reached a level where a strong wind was blowing in a southerly
direction. The jet-stream winds were not being plotted in 1948 but the
weather chart shows strong indications of a southerly bend in the jet stream

for this day. Jet stream or not, the balloon would have moved rapidly south,
still climbing. At a point somewhere south or southwest of Godman it
would have climbed through the southerly-moving winds to a calm belt at
about 60,000 feet. At this level it would slowly drift south or southeast. A
skyhook balloon can be seen at 60,000.

When first seen by the people in Godman Tower, the UFO was south of
the air base. It was relatively close and looked "like a parachute," which a
balloon does. During the two hours that it was in sight, the observers
reported that it seemed to hover, yet each observer estimated the time he
looked at the object through the binoculars and timewise the descriptions
ran "huge," "small," "one fourth the size of a full moon," "one tenth the size
of a full moon." Whatever the UFO was, it was slowly moving away. As the
balloon continued to drift in a southerly direction it would have picked up
stronger winds, and could have easily been seen by the astronomers in
Madisonville, Kentucky, and north of Nashville an hour after it disappeared
from view at Godman.

Somewhere in the archives of the Air Force or the Navy there are records
that will show whether or not a balloon was launched from Clinton County
AFB, Ohio, on January 7, 1948. I never could find these records. People
who were working with the early skyhook projects "remember" operating
out of Clinton County AFB in 1947 but refuse to be pinned down to a
January 7 flight. Maybe, they said.

The Mantell Incident is the same old UFO jigsaw puzzle. By assuming
the shape of one piece, a balloon launched from southwestern Ohio, the
whole picture neatly falls together. It shows a huge balloon that Captain
Thomas Mantell died trying to reach. He didn't know that he was chasing a
balloon because he had never heard of a huge, 100-foot- diameter skyhook

balloon, let alone seen one. Leave out the one piece of the jigsaw puzzle
and the picture is a UFO, "metallic and tremendous in size."

It could have been a balloon. This is the answer I phoned back to the
Pentagon.

During January and February of 1948 the reports of "ghost rockets"
continued to come from air attaches in foreign countries near the Baltic Sea.
People in North Jutland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany reported
"balls of fire traveling slowly across the sky." The reports were very sketchy
and incomplete, most of them accounts from newspapers. In a few days the
UFO's were being seen all over Europe and South America. Foreign reports
hit a peak in the latter part of February and U.S. newspapers began to pick
up the stories.

The Swedish Defense Staff supposedly conducted a comprehensive study
of the incidents and concluded that they were all explainable in terms of
astronomical phenomena. Since this was UFO history, I made several
attempts to get some detailed and official information on this report and the
sightings, but I was never successful.

The ghost rockets left in March, as mysteriously as they had arrived.

All during the spring of 1948 good reports continued to come in. Some
were just run-of-the-mill but a large percentage of them were good, coming
from people whose reliability couldn't be questioned. For example, three
scientists reported that for thirty seconds they had watched a round object
streak across the sky in a highly erratic flight path near the Army's secret
White Sands Proving Ground. And on May 28 the crew of an Air Force C-
47 had three UFO's barrel in from "twelve o'clock high" to buzz their
transport.

On July 21 a curious report was received from the Netherlands. The day
before several persons reported seeing a UFO through high broken clouds
over The Hague. The object was rocket-shaped, with two rows of windows
along the side. It was a poor report, very sketchy and incomplete, and it
probably would have been forgotten except that four nights later a similar
UFO almost collided with an Eastern Airlines DC-3. This near collision is
Volume II of "The Classics."

On the evening of July 24, 1948, an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off from
Houston, Texas. It was on a scheduled trip to Atlanta, with intermediate
stops in between. The pilots were Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted.
At about 2:45 A.M., when the flight was 20 miles southwest of
Montgomery, the captain, Chiles, saw a light dead ahead and closing fast.
His first reaction, he later reported to an ATIC investigation team, was that
it was a jet, but in an instant he realized that even a jet couldn't close as fast
as this light was closing. Chiles said he reached over, gave Whitted, the
other pilot, a quick tap on the arm, and pointed. The UFO was now almost
on top of them. Chiles racked the DC-3 into a tight left turn. Just as the
UFO flashed by about 700 feet to the right, the DC-3 hit turbulent air.
Whitted looked back just as the UFO pulled up in a steep climb.

Both the pilots had gotten a good look at the UFO and were able to give a
good description to the Air Force intelligence people. It was a B-29
fuselage. The underside had a "deep blue glow." There were "two rows of
windows from which bright lights glowed," and a "50-foot trail of orange-
red flame" shot out the back.

Only one passenger was looking out of the window at the time. The ATIC
investigators talked to him. He said he saw a "strange, eerie streak of light,
very intense," but that was all, no details. He said that it all happened before
he could adjust his eyes to the darkness.

Minutes later a crew chief at Robins Air Force Base in Macon, Georgia,
reported seeing an extremely bright light pass overhead, traveling at a high
speed. A few days later another report from the night of July 24 came in. A
pilot, flying near the Virginia-North Carolina state line, reported that he had
seen a "bright shooting star" in the direction of Montgomery, Alabama, at
about the exact time the Eastern Airlines DC-3 was "buzzed."

According to the old timers at ATIC, this report shook them worse than
the Mantell Incident. This was the first time two reliable sources had been
really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and
live to tell about it. A quick check on a map showed that the UFO that
nearly collided with the airliner would have passed almost over Macon,
Georgia, after passing the DC-3. It had been turning toward Macon when
last seen. The story of the crew chief at Robins AFB, 200 miles away,
seemed to confirm the sighting, not to mention the report from near the
Virginia-North Carolina state line.

In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem
you write a report that is known as an "Estimate of the Situation." A few
days after the DC-3 was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time
had arrived to make an Estimate of the Situation. The situation was the
UFO's; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!

It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on
legal-sized paper. Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.

It contained the Air Force's analysis of many of the incidents I have told
you about plus many similar ones. All of them had come from scientists,
pilots, and other equally credible observers, and each one was an unknown.

The document pointed out that the reports hadn't actually started with the
Arnold Incident. Belated reports from a weather observer in Richmond,

Virginia, who observed a "silver disk" through his theodolite telescope; an
F-47 pilot and three pilots in his formation who saw a "silver flying wing,"
and the English "ghost airplanes" that had been picked up on radar early in
1947 proved this point. Although reports on them were not received until
after the Arnold sighting, these incidents all had taken place earlier.

When the estimate was completed, typed, and approved, it started up
through channels to higher-command echelons. It drew considerable
comment but no one stopped it on its way up.

A matter of days after the Estimate of the Situation was signed, sealed,
and sent on its way, the third big sighting of 1948, Volume III of "The
Classics," took place. The date was October 1, and the place was Fargo,
North Dakota; it was the famous Gorman Incident, in which a pilot fought a
"duel of death" with a UFO.

The pilot was George F. Gorman, a twenty-five-year-old second
lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard.

It was eight-thirty in the evening and Gorman was coming into Fargo
from a cross-country flight. He flew around Fargo for a while and about
nine o'clock decided to land. He called the control tower for landing
instructions and was told that a Piper Cub was in the area. He saw the Cub
below him. All of a sudden what appeared to be the taillight of another
airplane passed him on his right. He called the tower and complained but
they assured him that no other aircraft except the Cub were in the area.
Gorman could still see the light so he decided to find out what it was. He
pushed the F-51 over into a turn and cut in toward the light. He could
plainly see the Cub outlined against the city lights below, but he could see
no outline of a body near the mysterious light. He gave the '51 more power
and closed to within a 1,000 yards, close enough to estimate that the light
was 6 to 8 inches in diameter, was sharply outlined, and was blinking on

and off. Suddenly the light became steady as it apparently put on power; it
pulled into a sharp left bank and made a pass at the tower. The light zoomed
up with the F-51 in hot pursuit. At 7,000 feet it made a turn. Gorman
followed and tried to cut inside the light's turn to get closer to it but he
couldn't do it. The light made another turn, and this time the '51 closed on a
collision course. The UFO appeared to try to ram the '51, and Gorman had
to dive to get out of the way. The UFO passed over the '51's canopy with
only a few feet to spare. Again both the F-51 and the object turned and
closed on each other head on, and again the pilot had to dive out to prevent
a collision. All of a sudden the light began to climb and disappeared.

"I had the distinct impression that its maneuvers were controlled by
thought or reason," Gorman later told ATIC investigators.

Four other observers at Fargo partially corroborated his story, an oculist,
Dr. A. D. Cannon, the Cub's pilot, and his passenger, Einar Neilson. They
saw a light "moving fast," but did not witness all the maneuvers that
Gorman reported. Two CAA employees on the ground saw a light move
over the field once.

Project Sign investigators rushed to Fargo. They had wired ahead to
ground the plane. They wanted to check it over before it flew again. When
they arrived, only a matter of hours after the incident, they went over the
airplane, from the prop spinner to the rudder trim tab, with a Geiger
counter. A chart in the official report shows where every Geiger counter
reading was taken. For comparison they took readings on a similar airplane
that hadn't been flown for several days. Gorman's airplane was more
radioactive. They rushed around, got sworn statements from the tower
operators and oculist, and flew back to Dayton.

In the file on the Gorman Incident I found an old memo reporting the
meeting that was held upon the ATIC team's return from Fargo. The memo

concluded that some weird things were taking place.

The historians of the UFO agree. Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps
major and a professional writer, author of The Flying Saucers Are Real and
Flying Saucers from Outer Space, needles the Air Force about the Gorman
Incident, pointing out how, after feebly hinting that the light could have
been a lighted weather balloon, they dropped it like a hot UFO. Some
person by the name of Wilkins, in an equally authoritative book, says that
the Gorman Incident "stumped" the Air Force. Other assorted historians
point out that normally the UFO's are peaceful, Gorman and Mantell just
got too inquisitive, "they" just weren't ready to be observed closely. If the
Air Force hadn't slapped down the security lid, these writers might not have
reached this conclusion. There have been other and more lurid "duels of
death."

On June 21, 1952, at 10:58P.M., a Ground Observer Corps spotter
reported that a slow-moving craft was nearing the AEC's Oak Ridge
Laboratory, an area so secret that it is prohibited to aircraft. The spotter
called the light into his filter center and the filter center relayed the message
to the ground control intercept radar. They had a target. But before they
could do more than confirm the GOC spotter's report, the target faded from
the radarscope.

An F-47 aircraft on combat air patrol in the area was vectored in visually,
spotted a light, and closed on it. They "fought" from 10,000 to 27,000 feet,
and several times the object made what seemed to be ramming attacks. The
light was described as white, 6 to 8 inches in diameter, and blinking until it
put on power. The pilot could see no silhouette around the light. The
similarity to the Fargo case was striking.

On the night of December 10, 1952, near another atomic installation, the
Hanford plant in Washington, the pilot and radar observer of a patrolling F-

94 spotted a light while flying at 26,000 feet. The crew called their ground
control station and were told that no planes were known to be in the area.
They closed on the object and saw a large, round, white "thing" with a dim
reddish light coming from two "windows." They lost visual contact, but got
a radar lock-on. They reported that when they attempted to close on it again
it would reverse direction and dive away. Several times the plane altered
course itself because collision seemed imminent.

In each of these instances, as well as in the case narrated next, the
sources of the stories were trained airmen with excellent reputations. They
were sincerely baffled by what they had seen. They had no conceivable
motive for falsifying or "dressing up" their reports.

The other dogfight occurred September 24, 1952, between a Navy pilot
of a TBM and a light over Cuba.

The pilot had just finished making some practice passes for night fighters
when he spotted an orange light to the east of his plane. He checked on
aircraft in the area, learned that the object was unidentified, and started after
it. Here is his report, written immediately after he landed:

As it [the light] approached the city from the east it started a left turn. I
started to intercept. During the first part of the chase the closest I got to the
light was 8 to 10 miles. At this time it appeared to be as large as an SNJ and
had a greenish tail that looked to be five to six times as long as the light's
diameter. This tail was seen several times in the next 10 minutes in periods
of from 5 to 30 seconds each. As I reached 10,000 feet it appeared to be at
15,000 feet and in a left turn. It took 40 degrees of bank to keep the nose of
my plane on the light. At this time I estimated the light to be in a 10-to-15-
mile orbit.

At 12,000 feet I stopped climbing, but the light was still climbing faster
than I was. I then reversed my turn from left to right and the light also
reversed. As I was not gaining distance, I held a steady course south trying
to estimate a perpendicular between the light and myself. The light was
moving north, so I turned north. As I turned, the light appeared to move
west, then south over the base. I again tried to intercept but the light
appeared to climb rapidly at a 60- degree angle. It climbed to 35,000 feet,
then started a rapid descent.

Prior to this, while the light was still at approximately 15,000 feet, I
deliberately placed it between the moon and myself three times to try to
identify a solid body. I and my two crewmen all had a good view of the
light as it passed the moon. We could see no solid body. We considered the
fact that it might be an aerologist's balloon, but we did not see a silhouette.
Also, we would have rapidly caught up with and passed a balloon.

During its descent, the light appeared to slow down at about 10,000 feet,
at which time I made three runs on it. Two were on a 90-degree collision
course, and the light traveled at tremendous speed across my bow. On the
third run I was so close that the light blanked out the airfield below me.
Suddenly it started a dive and I followed, losing it at 1,500 feet.

In this incident the UFO was a balloon.

The following night a lighted balloon was sent up and the pilot was
ordered up to compare his experiences. He duplicated his dogfight—
illusions and all. The Navy furnished us with a long analysis of the affair,
explaining how the pilot had been fooled.

In the case involving the ground observer and the F-47 near the atomic
installation, we plotted the winds and calculated that a lighted balloon was
right at the spot where the pilot encountered the light.

In the other instance, the "white object with two windows," we found that
a skyhook balloon had been plotted at the exact site of the "battle."

Gorman fought a lighted balloon too. An analysis of the sighting by the
Air Weather Service sent to ATIC in a letter dated January 24, 1949, proved
it. The radioactive F-51 was decontaminated by a memo from a Wright
Field laboratory explaining that a recently flown airplane will be more
radioactive than one that has been on the ground for several days. An
airplane at 20,000 to 30,000 feet picks up more cosmic rays than one
shielded by the earth's ever present haze.

Why can't experienced pilots recognize a balloon when they see one? If
they are flying at night, odd things can happen to their vision. There is the
problem of vertigo as well as disorientation brought on by flying without
points of reference. Night fighters have told dozens of stories of being
fooled by lights.

One night during World War II we had just dumped a load of bombs on a
target when a "night fighter" started to make a pass at us. Everyone in the
cockpit saw the fighter's red-hot exhaust stack as he bore down on us. I cut
loose with six caliber-.50 machine guns. Fortunately I missed the "night
fighter"—if I'd have shot it I'd have fouled up the astronomers but good
because the "night fighter" was Venus.

While the people on Project Sign were pondering over Lieutenant
Gorman's dogfight with the UFO—at the time they weren't even
considering the balloon angle—the Top Secret Estimate of the Situation was
working its way up into the higher echelons of the Air Force. It got to the
late General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then Chief of Staff, before it was batted
back down. The general wouldn't buy interplanetary vehicles. The report
lacked proof. A group from ATIC went to the Pentagon to bolster their
position but had no luck, the Chief of Staff just couldn't be convinced.

The estimate died a quick death. Some months later it was completely
declassified and relegated to the incinerator. A few copies, one of which I
saw, were kept as mementos of the golden days of the UFO's.

The top Air Force command's refusal to buy the interplanetary theory
didn't have any immediate effect upon the morale of Project Sign because
the reports were getting better.

A belated report that is more of a collectors' item than a good UFO
sighting came into ATIC in the fall of 1948. It was from Moscow. Someone,
I could never find out exactly who, reported a huge "smudge- like" object in
the sky.

Then radar came into the picture. For months the anti-saucer factions had
been pointing their fingers at the lack of radar reports, saying, "If they exist,
why don't they show up on radarscopes?" When they showed up on
radarscopes, the UFO won some converts.

On October 15 an F-61, a World War II "Black Widow" night fighter, was
on patrol over Japan when it picked up an unidentified target on its radar.
The target was flying between 5,000 and 6,000 feet and traveling about 200
miles per hour. When the F-61 tried to intercept it would get to within
12,000 feet of the UFO only to have it accelerate to an estimated 1,200
miles per hour, leaving the F-61 far behind before slowing down again. The
F-61 crew made six attempts to close on the UFO. On one pass, the crew
said, they did get close enough to see its silhouette. It was 20 to 30 feet long
and looked "like a rifle bullet."

Toward the end of November a wire came into Project Sign from
Germany. It was the first report where a UFO was seen and simultaneously
picked up on radar. This type of report, the first of many to come, is one of
the better types of UFO reports. The wire said:

At 2200 hours, local time, 23 November 1948, Capt. ——— saw an
object in the air directly east of this base. It was at an unknown altitude. It
looked like a reddish star and was moving in a southerly direction across
Munich, turning slightly to the southwest then the southeast. The speed
could have been between 200 to 600 mph, the actual speed could not be
estimated, not knowing the height. Capt. —- —- called base operations and
they called the radar station. Radar reported that they had seen nothing on
their scope but would check again. Radar then called operations to report
that they did have a target at 27,000 feet, some 30 miles south of Munich,
traveling at 900 mph. Capt. ——— reported that the object that he saw was
now in that area. A few minutes later radar called again to say that the target
had climbed to 50,000 feet, and was circling 40 miles south of Munich.

Capt. ——— is an experienced pilot now flying F-80's and is considered
to be completely reliable. The sighting was verified by Capt. ——— , also
an F-80 pilot.

The possibility that this was a balloon was checked but the answer from
Air Weather Service was "not a balloon." No aircraft were in the area.
Nothing we know of, except possibly experimental aircraft, which are not in
Germany, can climb 23,000 feet in a matter of minutes and travel 900 miles
per hour.

By the end of 1948, Project Sign had received several hundred UFO
reports. Of these, 167 had been saved as good reports. About three dozen
were "Unknown." Even though the UFO reports were getting better and
more numerous, the enthusiasm over the interplanetary idea was cooling
off. The same people who had fought to go to Godman AFB to talk to
Colonel Hix and his UFO observers in January now had to be prodded
when a sighting needed investigating. More and more work was being
pushed off onto the other investigative organization that was helping ATIC.

The kickback on the Top Secret Estimate of the Situation was beginning to
dampen a lot of enthusiasms. It was definitely a bear market for UFO's.

A bull market was on the way, however. Early 1949 was to bring "little
lights" and green fireballs.

The "little lights" were UFO's, but the green fireballs were real.

CHAPTER FOUR

Green Fireballs, Project Twinkle, Little Lights, and Grudge

At exactly midnight on September 18, 1954, my telephone rang. It was
Jim Phalen, a friend of mine from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and he
had a "good flying saucer report," hot off the wires. He read it to me. The
lead line was: "Thousands of people saw a huge fireball light up dark New
Mexico skies tonight."

The story went on to tell about how a "blinding green" fireball the size of
a full moon had silently streaked southeast across Colorado and northern
New Mexico at eight-forty that night. Thousands of people had seen the
fireball. It had passed right over a crowded football stadium at Santa Fe,
New Mexico, and people in Denver said it "turned night into day." The crew
of a TWA airliner flying into Albuquerque from Amarillo, Texas, saw it.
Every police and newspaper switchboard in the two-state area was jammed
with calls.

One of the calls was from a man inquiring if anything unusual had
happened recently. When he was informed about the mysterious fireball he
heaved an audible sigh of relief, "Thanks," he said, "I was afraid I'd gotten
some bad bourbon." And he hung up.

Dr. Lincoln La Paz, world-famous authority on meteorites and head of
the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics, apparently took the
occurrence calmly. The wire story said he had told a reporter that he would
plot its course, try to determine where it landed, and go out and try to find
it. "But," he said, "I don't expect to find anything."

When Jim Phalen had read the rest of the report he asked, "What was it?"

"It sounds to me like the green fireballs are back," I answered.

"What the devil are green fireballs?"

What the devil are green fireballs? I'd like to know. So would a lot of
other people.

The green fireballs streaked into UFO history late in November 1948,
when people around Albuquerque, New Mexico, began to report seeing
mysterious "green flares" at night. The first reports mentioned only a "green
streak in the sky," low on the horizon. From the description the Air Force
Intelligence people at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque and the Project Sign
people at ATIC wrote the objects off as flares. After all, thousands of GI's
had probably been discharged with a duffel bag full of "liberated" Very
pistols and flares.

But as days passed the reports got better. They seemed to indicate that the
"flares" were getting larger and more people were reporting seeing them. It
was doubtful if this "growth" was psychological because there had been no
publicity—so the Air Force decided to reconsider the "flare" answer. They
were in the process of doing this on the night of December 5, 1948, a
memorable night in the green fireball chapter of UFO history.

At 9:27P.M. on December 5, an Air Force C-47 transport was flying at
18,000 feet 10 miles east of Albuquerque. The pilot was a Captain Goede.
Suddenly the crew, Captain Goede, his co-pilot, and his engineer were
startled by a green ball of fire flashing across the sky ahead of them. It
looked something like a huge meteor except that it was a bright green color
and it didn't arch downward, as meteors usually do. The green-colored ball
of fire had started low, from near the eastern slopes of the Sandia
Mountains, arched upward a little, then seemed to level out. And it was too
big for a meteor, at least it was larger than any meteor that anyone in the C-
47 had ever seen before. After a hasty discussion the crew decided that
they'd better tell somebody about it, especially since they had seen an
identical object twenty-two minutes before near Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Captain Goede picked up his microphone and called the control tower at
Kirtland AFB and reported what he and his crew had seen. The tower
relayed the message to the local intelligence people.

A few minutes later the captain of Pioneer Airlines Flight 63 called
Kirtland Tower. At 9:35P.M. he had also seen a green ball of fire just east of
Las Vegas, New Mexico. He was on his way to Albuquerque and would
make a full report when he landed.

When he taxied his DC-3 up to the passenger ramp at Kirtland a few
minutes later, several intelligence officers were waiting for him. He
reported that at 9:35P.M. he was on a westerly heading, approaching Las
Vegas from the east, when he and his co-pilot saw what they first thought
was a "shooting star." It was ahead and a little above them. But, the captain
said, it took them only a split second to realize that whatever they saw was
too low and had too flat a trajectory to be a meteor. As they watched, the
object seemed to approach their airplane head on, changing color from
orange red to green. As it became bigger and bigger, the captain said, he

thought sure it was going to collide with them so he racked the DC-3 up in
a tight turn. As the green ball of fire got abreast of them it began to fall
toward the ground, getting dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared. Just
before he swerved the DC-3, the fireball was as big, or bigger, than a full
moon.

The intelligence officers asked a few more questions and went back to
their office. More reports, which had been phoned in from all over northern
New Mexico, were waiting for them. By morning a full-fledged
investigation was under way.

No matter what these green fireballs were, the military was getting a little
edgy. They might be common meteorites, psychologically enlarged flares,
or true UFO's, but whatever they were they were playing around in one of
the most sensitive security areas in the United States. Within 100 miles of
Albuquerque were two installations that were the backbone of the atomic
bomb program, Los Alamos and Sandia Base. Scattered throughout the
countryside were other installations vital to the defense of the U.S.: radar
stations, fighter-interceptor bases, and the other mysterious areas that had
been blocked off by high chain-link fences.

Since the green fireballs bore some resemblance to meteors or meteorites,
the Kirtland intelligence officers called in Dr. Lincoln La Paz.

Dr. La Paz said that he would be glad to help, so the officers explained
the strange series of events to him. True, he said, the description of the
fireballs did sound as if they might be meteorites —except for a few points.
One way to be sure was to try to plot the flight path of the green fireballs
the same way he had so successfully plotted the flight path of meteorites in
the past. From this flight path he could determine where they would have
hit the earth—if they were meteorites. They would search this area, and if

they found parts of a meteorite they would have the answer to the green
fireball riddle.

The fireball activity on the night of December 5 was made to order for
plotting flight paths. The good reports of that night included carefully noted
locations, the directions in which the green objects were seen, their heights
above the horizon, and the times when they were observed. So early the
next morning Dr. La Paz and a crew of intelligence officers were scouring
northern New Mexico. They started out by talking to the people who had
made reports but soon found out that dozens of other people had also seen
the fireballs. By closely checking the time of the observations, they
determined that eight separate fireballs had been seen. One was evidently
more spectacular and was seen by the most people. Everyone in northern
New Mexico had seen it going from west to east, so Dr. La Paz and his
crew worked eastward across New Mexico to the west border of Texas,
talking to dozens of people. After many sleepless hours they finally plotted
where it should have struck the earth. They searched the area but found
nothing. They went back over the area time and time again— nothing. As
Dr. La Paz later told me, this was the first time that he seriously doubted the
green fireballs were meteorites.

Within a few more days the fireballs were appearing almost nightly. The
intelligence officers from Kirtland decided that maybe they could get a
good look at one of them, so on the night of December 8 two officers took
off in an airplane just before dark and began to cruise around north of
Albuquerque. They had a carefully worked out plan where each man would
observe certain details if they saw one of the green fireballs. At 6:33P.M.
they saw one. This is their report:

At 6:33P.M. while flying at an indicated altitude of 11,500 feet, a strange
phenomenon was observed. Exact position of the aircraft at time of the

observation was 20 miles east of the Las Vegas, N.M., radio range station.
The aircraft was on a compass course of 90 degrees. Capt. ——— was pilot
and I was acting as copilot. I first observed the object and a split second
later the pilot saw it. It was 2,000 feet higher than the plane, and was
approaching the plane at a rapid rate of speed from 30 degrees to the left of
our course. The object was similar in appearance to a burning green flare,
the kind that is commonly used in the Air Force. However, the light was
much more intense and the object appeared considerably larger than a
normal flare. The trajectory of the object, when first sighted, was almost flat
and parallel to the earth. The phenomenon lasted about 2 seconds. At the
end of this time the object seemed to begin to burn out and the trajectory
then dropped off rapidly. The phenomenon was of such intensity as to be
visible from the very moment it ignited.

Back at Wright-Patterson AFB, ATIC was getting a blow-by-blow
account of the fireball activity but they were taking no direct part in the
investigation. Their main interest was to review all incoming UFO reports
and see if the green fireball reports were actually unique to the Albuquerque
area. They were. Although a good many UFO reports were coming in from
other parts of the U.S., none fit the description of the green fireballs.

All during December 1948 and January 1949 the green fireballs
continued to invade the New Mexico skies. Everyone, including the
intelligence officers at Kirtland AFB, Air Defense Command people, Dr. La
Paz, and some of the most distinguished scientists at Los Alamos had seen
at least one.

In mid-February 1949 a conference was called at Los Alamos to
determine what should be done to further pursue the investigation. The Air
Force, Project Sign, the intelligence people at Kirtland, and other interested
parties had done everything they could think of and still no answer.

Such notable scientists as Dr. Joseph Kaplan, a world-renowned authority
on the physics of the upper atmosphere, Dr. Edward Teller, of H-bomb
fame, and of course Dr. La Paz, attended, along with a lot of military brass
and scientists from Los Alamos.

This was one conference where there was no need to discuss whether or
not this special type of UFO, the green fireball, existed. Almost everyone at
the meeting had seen one. The purpose of the conference was to decide
whether the fireballs were natural or man-made and how to find out more
about them.

As happens in any conference, opinions were divided. Some people
thought the green fireballs were natural fireballs. The proponents of the
natural meteor, or meteorite, theory presented facts that they had dug out of
astronomical journals. Greenish-colored meteors, although not common,
had been observed on many occasions. The flat trajectory, which seemed to
be so important in proving that the green fireballs were extraterrestrial, was
also nothing new. When viewed from certain angles, a meteor can appear to
have a flat trajectory. The reason that so many had been seen during
December of 1948 and January of 1949 was that the weather had been
unusually clear all over the Southwest during this period.

Dr. La Paz led the group who believed that the green fireballs were not
meteors or meteorites. His argument was derived from the facts that he had
gained after many days of research and working with Air Force intelligence
teams. He stuck to the points that (1) the trajectory was too flat, (2) the
color was too green, and (3) he couldn't locate any fragments even though
he had found the spots where they should have hit the earth if they were
meteorites.

People who were at that meeting have told me that Dr. La Paz's theory
was very interesting and that each point was carefully considered. But

evidently it wasn't conclusive enough because when the conference broke
up, after two days, it was decided that the green fireballs were a natural
phenomenon of some kind. It was recommended that this phase of the UFO
investigation be given to the Air Force's Cambridge Research Laboratory,
since it is the function of this group to study natural phenomena, and that
Cambridge set up a project to attempt to photograph the green fireballs and
measure their speed, altitude, and size.

In the late summer of 1949, Cambridge established Project Twinkle to
solve the mystery. The project called for establishing three cinetheodolite
stations near White Sands, New Mexico. A cinetheodolite is similar to a 35-
mm. movie camera except when you take a photograph of an object you
also get a photograph of three dials that show the time the photo was taken,
the azimuth angle, and the elevation angle of the camera. If two or more
cameras photograph the same object, it is possible to obtain a very accurate
measurement of the photographed object's altitude, speed, and size.

Project Twinkle was a bust. Absolutely nothing was photographed. Of the
three cameras that were planned for the project, only one was available.
This one camera was continually being moved from place to place. If
several reports came from a certain area, the camera crew would load up
their equipment and move to that area, always arriving too late. Any duck
hunter can tell you that this is the wrong tactic; if you want to shoot any
ducks pick a good place and stay put, let the ducks come to you.

The people trying to operate Project Twinkle were having financial and
morale trouble. To do a good job they needed more and better equipment
and more people, but Air Force budget cuts precluded this. Moral support
was free but they didn't get this either.

When the Korean War started, Project Twinkle silently died, along with
official interest in green fireballs.

When I organized Project Blue Book in the summer of 1951 I'd never
heard of a green fireball. We had a few files marked "Los Alamos
Conference," "Fireballs," "Project Twinkle," etc., but I didn't pay any
attention to them.

Then one day I was at a meeting in Los Angeles with several other
officers from ATIC, and was introduced to Dr. Joseph Kaplan. When he
found we were from ATIC, his first question was, "What ever happened to
the green fireballs?" None of us had ever heard of them, so he quickly gave
us the story. He and I ended up discussing green fireballs. He mentioned Dr.
La Paz and his opinion that the green fireballs might be man-made, and
although he respected La Paz's professional ability, he just wasn't
convinced. But he did strongly urge me to get in touch with Dr. La Paz and
hear his side of the story.

When I returned to ATIC I spent several days digging into our collection
of green fireball reports. All of these reports covered a period from early
December 1948 to 1949. As far as Blue Book's files were concerned, there
hadn't been a green fireball report for a year and a half.

I read over the report on Project Twinkle and the few notes we had on the
Los Alamos Conference, and decided that the next time I went to
Albuquerque I'd contact Dr. La Paz. I did go to Albuquerque several times
but my visits were always short and I was always in a hurry so I didn't get
to see him.

It was six or eight months later before the subject of green fireballs came
up again. I was eating lunch with a group of people at the AEC's Los
Alamos Laboratory when one of the group mentioned the mysterious kelly-
green balls of fire. The strictly unofficial bull- session-type discussion that
followed took up the entire lunch hour and several hours of the afternoon. It
was an interesting discussion because these people, all scientists and

technicians from the lab, had a few educated guesses as to what they might
be. All of them had seen a green fireball, some of them had seen several.

One of the men, a private pilot, had encountered a fireball one night
while he was flying his Navion north of Santa Fe and he had a vivid way of
explaining what he'd seen. "Take a soft ball and paint it with some kind of
fluorescent paint that will glow a bright green in the dark," I remember his
saying, "then have someone take the ball out about 100 feet in front of you
and about 10 feet above you. Have him throw the ball right at your face, as
hard as he can throw it. That's what a green fireball looks like."

The speculation about what the green fireballs were ran through the usual
spectrum of answers, a new type of natural phenomenon, a secret U.S.
development, and psychologically enlarged meteors. When the possibility
of the green fireballs' being associated with interplanetary vehicles came up,
the whole group got serious. They had been doing a lot of thinking about
this, they said, and they had a theory.

The green fireballs, they theorized, could be some type of unmanned test
vehicle that was being projected into our atmosphere from a "spaceship"
hovering several hundred miles above the earth. Two years ago I would
have been amazed to hear a group of reputable scientists make such a
startling statement. Now, however, I took it as a matter of course. I'd heard
the same type of statement many times before from equally qualified
groups.

Turn the tables, they said, suppose that we are going to try to go to a far
planet. There would be three phases to the trip: out through the earth's
atmosphere, through space, and the re-entry into the atmosphere of the
planet we're planning to land on. The first two phases would admittedly
present formidable problems, but the last phase, the re-entry phase, would
be the most critical. Coming in from outer space, the craft would, for all

practical purposes, be similar to a meteorite except that it would be powered
and not free-falling. You would have myriad problems associated with
aerodynamic heating, high aerodynamic loadings, and very probably a host
of other problems that no one can now conceive of. Certain of these
problems could be partially solved by laboratory experimentation, but
nothing can replace flight testing, and the results obtained by flight tests in
our atmosphere would not be valid in another type of atmosphere. The most
logical way to overcome this difficulty would be to build our interplanetary
vehicle, go to the planet that we were interested in landing on, and hover
several hundred miles up. From this altitude we could send instrumented
test vehicles down to the planet. If we didn't want the inhabitants of the
planet, if it were inhabited, to know what we were doing we could put
destruction devices in the test vehicle, or arrange the test so that the test
vehicles would just plain burn up at a certain point due to aerodynamic
heating.

They continued, each man injecting his ideas.

Maybe the green fireballs are test vehicles—somebody else's. The regular
UFO reports might be explained by the fact that the manned vehicles were
venturing down to within 100,000 or 200,000 feet of the earth, or to the
altitude at which atmosphere re-entry begins to get critical.

I had to go down to the airstrip to get a CARCO Airlines plane back to
Albuquerque so I didn't have time to ask a lot of questions that came into
my mind. I did get to make one comment. From the conversations, I
assumed that these people didn't think the green fireballs were any kind of a
natural phenomenon. Not exactly, they said, but so far the evidence that said
they were a natural phenomenon was vastly outweighed by the evidence
that said they weren't.

During the kidney-jolting trip down the valley from Los Alamos to
Albuquerque in one of the CARCO Airlines' Bonanzas, I decided that
I'd stay over an extra day and talk to Dr. La Paz.

He knew every detail there was to know about the green fireballs. He
confirmed my findings, that the genuine green fireballs were no longer
being seen. He said that he'd received hundreds of reports, especially after
he'd written several articles about the mysterious fireballs, but that all of the
reported objects were just greenish- colored, common, everyday meteors.

Dr. La Paz said that some people, including Dr. Joseph Kaplan and Dr.
Edward Teller, thought that the green fireballs were natural meteors. He
didn't think so, however, for several reasons. First the color was so much
different. To illustrate his point, Dr. La Paz opened his desk drawer and
took out a well-worn chart of the color spectrum. He checked off two
shades of green; one a pale, almost yellowish green and the other a much
more distinct vivid green. He pointed to the bright green and told me that
this was the color of the green fireballs. He'd taken this chart with him when
he went out to talk to people who had seen the green fireballs and everyone
had picked this one color. The pale green, he explained, was the color
reported in the cases of documented green meteors.

Then there were other points of dissimilarity between a meteor and the
green fireballs. The trajectory of the fireballs was too flat. Dr. La Paz
explained that a meteor doesn't necessarily have to arch down across the
sky, its trajectory can appear to be flat, but not as flat as that of the green
fireballs. Then there was the size. Almost always such descriptive words as
"terrifying," "as big as the moon," and "blinding" had been used to describe
the fireballs. Meteors just aren't this big and bright.

No—Dr. La Paz didn't think that they were meteors.

Dr. La Paz didn't believe that they were meteorites either.

A meteorite is accompanied by sound and shock waves that break
windows and stampede cattle. Yet in every case of a green fireball sighting
the observers reported that they did not hear any sound.

But the biggest mystery of all was the fact that no particles of a green
fireball had ever been found. If they were meteorites, Dr. La Paz was
positive that he would have found one. He'd missed very few times in the
cases of known meteorites. He pulled a map out of his file to show me what
he meant. It was a map that he had used to plot the spot where a meteorite
had hit the earth. I believe it was in Kansas. The map had been prepared
from information he had obtained from dozens of people who had seen the
meteorite come flaming toward the earth. At each spot where an observer
was standing he'd drawn in the observer's line of sight to the meteorite.
From the dozens of observers he had obtained dozens of lines of sight. The
lines all converged to give Dr. La Paz a plot of the meteorite's downward
trajectory. Then he had been able to plot the spot where it had struck the
earth. He and his crew went to the marked area, probed the ground with
long steel poles, and found the meteorite.

This was just one case that he showed me. He had records of many more
similar successful expeditions in his file.

Then he showed me some other maps. The plotted lines looked identical
to the ones on the map I'd just seen. Dr. La Paz had used the same
techniques on these plots and had marked an area where he wanted to
search. He had searched the area many times but he had never found
anything.

These were plots of the path of a green fireball.

When Dr. La Paz had finished, I had one last question, "What do you
think they are?"

He weighed the question for a few seconds—then he said that all he
cared to say was that he didn't think that they were a natural phenomenon.
He thought that maybe someday one would hit the earth and the mystery
would be solved. He hoped that they were a natural phenomenon.

After my talk with Dr. La Paz I can well understand his apparent
calmness on the night of September 18, 1954, when the newspaper reporter
called him to find out if he planned to investigate this latest green fireball
report. He was speaking from experience, not indifference, when he said,
"But I don't expect to find anything."

If the green fireballs are back, I hope that Dr. La Paz gets an answer this
time.

The story of the UFO now goes back to late January 1949, the time when
the Air Force was in the midst of the green fireball mystery. In another part
of the country another odd series of events was taking place. The center of
activity was a highly secret area that can't be named, and the recipient of the
UFO's, which were formations of little lights, was the U.S. Army.

The series of incidents started when military patrols who were protecting
the area began to report seeing formations of lights flying through the night
sky. At first the lights were reported every three or four nights, but inside of
two weeks the frequency had stepped up. Before long they were a nightly
occurrence. Some patrols reported that they had seen three or four
formations in one night. The sightings weren't restricted to the men on
patrol. One night, just at dusk, during retreat, the entire garrison watched a
formation pass directly over the post parade ground.

As usual with UFO reports, the descriptions of the lights varied but the
majority of the observers reported a V formation of three lights. As the
formation moved through the sky, the lights changed in color from a bluish
white to orange and back to bluish white. This color cycle took about two
seconds. The lights usually traveled from west to east and made no sound.
They didn't streak across the sky like a meteor, but they were "going faster
than a jet." The lights were "a little bigger than the biggest star." Once in a
while the GI's would get binoculars on them but they couldn't see any more
details. The lights just looked bigger.

From the time of the first sighting, reports of the little lights were being
sent to the Air Force through Army Intelligence channels. The reports were
getting to ATIC, but the green fireball activity was taking top billing and no
comments went back to the Army about their little lights. According to an
Army G-2 major to whom I talked in the Pentagon, this silence was taken to
mean that no action, other than sending in reports, was necessary on the part
of the Army.

But after about two weeks of nightly sightings and no apparent action by
the Air Force, the commander of the installation decided to take the
initiative and set a trap. His staff worked out a plan in record time. Special
UFO patrols would be sent out into the security area and they would be
furnished with sighting equipment. This could be the equipment that they
normally used for fire control. Each patrol would be sent to a specific
location and would set up a command post. Operating out of the command
post, at points where the sky could be observed, would be sighting teams.
Each team had sighting equipment to measure the elevation and azimuth
angle of the UFO. Four men were to be on each team, an instrument man, a
timer, a recorder, and a radio operator. All the UFO patrols would be
assigned special radio frequencies.

The operating procedure would be that when one sighting team spotted a
UFO the radio operator would call out his team's location, the location of
the UFO in the sky, and the direction it was going. All of the other teams
from his patrol would thus know when to look for the UFO and begin to
sight on it. While the radio man was reporting, the instrument man on the
team would line up the UFO and begin to call out the angles of elevation
and azimuth. The timer would call out the time; the recorder would write all
of this down. The command post, upon hearing the report of the UFO,
would call the next patrol and tell them. They too would try to pick it up.

Here was an excellent opportunity to get some concrete data on at least
one type of UFO. It was something that should have been done from the
start. Speeds, altitudes, and sizes that are estimated just by looking at a
UFO are miserably inaccurate. But if you could accurately establish that
some type of object was traveling 30,000 miles an hour—or even 3,000
miles an hour—through our atmosphere, the UFO story would be the
biggest story since the Creation.

The plan seemed foolproof and had the full support of every man who
was to participate. For the first time in history every GI wanted to get on the
patrols. The plan was quickly written up as a field order, approved, and
mimeographed. Since the Air Force had the prime responsibility for the
UFO investigation, it was decided that the plan should be quickly co-
ordinated with the Air Force, so a copy was rushed to them. Time was
critical because every group of nightly reports might be the last. Everything
was ready to roll the minute the Air Force said "Go."

The Air Force didn't O.K. the plan. I don't know where the plan was
killed, or who killed it, but it was killed. Its death caused two reactions.

Many people thought that the plan was killed so that too many people
wouldn't find out the truth about UFO's. Others thought somebody was just

plain stupid. Neither was true. The answer was simply that the official
attitude toward UFO's had drastically changed in the past few months. They
didn't exist, they couldn't exist. It was the belief at ATIC that the one last
mystery, the green fireballs, had been solved a few days before at Los
Alamos. The fireballs were meteors and Project Twinkle would prove it.
Any further investigation by the Army would be a waste of time and effort.

This drastic change in official attitude is as difficult to explain as it was
difficult for many people who knew what was going on inside Project Sign
to believe. I use the words "official attitude" because at this time UFO's had
become as controversial a subject as they are today. All through intelligence
circles people had chosen sides and the two UFO factions that exist today
were born.

On one side was the faction that still believed in flying saucers. These
people, come hell or high water, were hanging on to their original ideas.
Some thought that the UFO's were interplanetary spaceships. Others weren't
quite as bold and just believed that a good deal more should be known
about the UFO's before they were so completely written off. These people
weren't a bunch of nuts or crackpots either. They ranged down through the
ranks from generals and top-grade civilians. On the outside their views
were backed up by civilian scientists.

On the other side were those who didn't believe in flying saucers. At one
time many of them had been believers. When the UFO reports were pouring
in back in 1947 and 1948, they were just as sure that the UFO's were real as
the people they were now scoffing at. But they had changed their minds.
Some of them had changed their minds because they had seriously studied
the UFO reports and just couldn't see any evidence that the UFO's were
real. But many of them could see the "I don't believe" band wagon pulling
out in front and just jumped on.

This change in the operating policy of the UFO project was so
pronounced that I, like so many other people, wondered if there was a
hidden reason for the change. Was it actually an attempt to go underground
—to make the project more secretive? Was it an effort to cover up the fact
that UFO's were proven to be interplanetary and that this should be
withheld from the public at all cost to prevent a mass panic? The UFO files
are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when
Orson Welles presented his now famous "The War of the Worlds" broadcast.

This period of "mind changing" bothered me. Here were people deciding
that there was nothing to this UFO business right at a time when the reports
seemed to be getting better. From what I could see, if there was any mind
changing to be done it should have been the other way, skeptics should have
been changing to believers.

Maybe I was just playing the front man to a big cover-up. I didn't like it
because if somebody up above me knew that UFO's were really spacecraft,
I could make a big fool out of myself if the truth came out. I checked into
this thoroughly. I spent a lot of time talking to people who had worked on
Project Grudge.

The anti-saucer faction was born because of an old psychological trait,
people don't like to be losers. To be a loser makes one feel inferior and
incompetent. On September 23, 1947, when the chief of ATIC sent a letter
to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces stating that UFO's
were real, intelligence committed themselves. They had to prove it. They
tried for a year and a half with no success. Officers on top began to get
anxious and the press began to get anxious. They wanted an answer.
Intelligence had tried one answer, the then Top Secret Estimate of the
Situation that "proved" that UFO's were real, but it was kicked back. The
people on the UFO project began to think maybe the brass didn't consider

them too sharp so they tried a new hypothesis: UFO's don't exist. In no time
they found that this was easier to prove and it got recognition. Before if an
especially interesting UFO report came in and the Pentagon wanted an
answer, all they'd get was an "It could be real but we can't prove it." Now
such a request got a quick, snappy "It was a balloon," and feathers were
stuck in caps from ATIC up to the Pentagon. Everybody felt fine.

In early 1949 the term "new look" was well known. The new look in
women's fashions was the lower hemlines, in automobiles it was longer
lines. In UFO circles the new look was cuss 'em.

The new look in UFO's was officially acknowledged on February 11,
1949, when an order was written that changed the name of the UFO project
from Project Sign to Project Grudge. The order was supposedly written
because the classified name, Project Sign, had been compromised. This was
always my official answer to any questions about the name change. I'd go
further and say that the names of the projects, first Sign, then Grudge, had
no significance. This wasn't true, they did have significance, a lot of it.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dark Ages

The order of February 11, 1949, that changed the name of Project Sign to
Project Grudge had not directed any change in the operating policy of the
project. It had, in fact, pointed out that the project was to continue to
investigate and evaluate reports of sightings of unidentified flying objects.
In doing this, standard intelligence procedures would be used. This
normally means the unbiased evaluation of intelligence data. But it doesn't
take a great deal of study of the old UFO files to see that standard

intelligence procedures were no longer being used by Project Grudge.
Everything was being evaluated on the premise that UFO's couldn't exist.
No matter what you see or hear, don't believe it.

New people took over Project Grudge. ATIC's top intelligence specialists
who had been so eager to work on Project Sign were no longer working on
Project Grudge. Some of them had drastically and hurriedly changed their
minds about UFO's when they thought that the Pentagon was no longer
sympathetic to the UFO cause. They were now directing their talents toward
more socially acceptable projects. Other charter members of Project Sign
had been "purged." These were the people who had refused to change their
original opinions about UFO's.

With the new name and the new personnel came the new objective, get
rid of the UFO's. It was never specified this way in writing but it didn't take
much effort to see that this was the goal of Project Grudge. This unwritten
objective was reflected in every memo, report, and directive.

To reach their objective Project Grudge launched into a campaign that
opened a new age in the history of the UFO. If a comparative age in world
history can be chosen, the Dark Ages would be most appropriate. Webster's
Dictionary defines the Dark Ages as a period of "intellectual stagnation."

To one who is intimately familiar with UFO history it is clear that Project
Grudge had a two-phase program of UFO annihilation. The first phase
consisted of explaining every UFO report. The second phase was to tell the
public how the Air Force had solved all the sightings. This, Project Grudge
reasoned, would put an end to UFO reports.

Phase one had been started by the people of Project Sign. They realized
that a great many reports were caused by people seeing balloons or such
astronomical bodies as planets, meteors, or stars. They also realized that

before they could get to the heart of the UFO problems they had to sift out
this type of report. To do this they had called on outside help. Air Weather
Service had been asked to screen the reports and check those that sounded
like balloons against their records of balloon flights. Dr. J. Allen Hynek,
distinguished astrophysicist and head of Ohio State University's Astronomy
Department, had been given a contract to sort out those reports that could
be blamed on stars, planets, meteors, etc. By early March the Air Weather
Service and Dr. Hynek had some positive identifications. According to the
old records, with these solutions and those that Sign and Grudge had
already found, about 50 per cent of the reported UFO's could now be
positively identified as hoaxes, balloons, planets, sundogs, etc. It was now
time to start phase two, the publicity campaign.

For many months reporters and writers had been trying to reach behind
the security wall and get the UFO story from the horse's mouth, but no luck.
Some of them were still trying but they were having no success because
they were making the mistake of letting it slip that they didn't believe that
airline pilots, military pilots, scientists, and just all around solid citizens
were having "hallucinations," perpetrating "hoaxes," or being deceived by
the "misidentification of common objects." The people of Project Grudge
weren't looking for this type of writer, they wanted a writer who would
listen to them and write their story. As a public relations officer later told
me, "We had a devil of a time. All of the writers who were after saucer
stories had made their own investigations of sightings and we couldn't
convince them they were wrong."

Before long, however, the right man came along. He was Sidney Shallet,
a writer for The Saturday Evening Post. He seemed to have the
prerequisites that were desired, so his visit to ATIC was cleared through the
Pentagon. Harry Haberer, a crack Air Force public relations man, was
assigned the job of seeing that Shallet got his story. I have heard many

times, from both military personnel and civilians, that the Air Force told
Shallet exactly what to say in his article—play down the UFO's—don't
write anything that even hints that there might be something foreign in our
skies. I don't believe that this is the case. I think that he just wrote the UFO
story as it was told to him, told to him by Project Grudge.

Shallet's article, which appeared in two parts in the April 30 and May 7,
1949, issues of The Saturday Evening Post, is important in the history of the
UFO and in understanding the UFO problem because it had considerable
effect on public opinion. Many people had, with varying degrees of interest,
been wondering about the UFO's for over a year and a half. Very few had
any definite opinions one way or the other. The feeling seemed to be that
the Air Force is working on the problem and when they get the answer we'll
know. There had been a few brief, ambiguous press releases from the Air
Force but these meant nothing. Consequently when Shallet's article
appeared in the Post it was widely read. It contained facts, and the facts had
come from Air Force Intelligence. This was the Air Force officially
reporting on UFO's for the first time.

The article was typical of the many flying saucer stories that were to
follow in the later years of UFO history, all written from material obtained
from the Air Force. Shallet's article casually admitted that a few UFO
sightings couldn't be explained, but the reader didn't have much chance to
think about this fact because 99 per cent of the story was devoted to the
anti-saucer side of the problem. It was the typical negative approach. I
know that the negative approach is typical of the way that material is
handed out by the Air Force because I was continually being told to "tell
them about the sighting reports we've solved—don't mention the
unknowns." I was never ordered to tell this, but it was a strong suggestion
and in the military when higher headquarters suggests, you do.

Shallet's article started out by psychologically conditioning the reader by
using such phrases as "the great flying saucer scare," "rich, full-blown
screwiness," "fearsome freaks," and so forth. By the time the reader gets to
the meat of the article he feels like a rich, full-blown jerk for ever even
thinking about UFO's.

He pointed out how the "furor" about UFO reports got so great that the
Air Force was "forced" to investigate the reports reluctantly. He didn't
mention that two months after the first UFO report ATIC had asked for
Project Sign since they believed that UFO's did exist. Nor did it mention the
once Top Secret Estimate of the Situation that also concluded that UFO's
were real. In no way did the article reflect the excitement and anxiety of the
age of Project Sign when secret conferences preceded and followed every
trip to investigate a UFO report. This was the Air Force being "forced" into
reluctantly investigating the UFO reports.

Laced through the story were the details of several UFO sightings; some
new and some old, as far as the public was concerned. The original UFO
report by Kenneth Arnold couldn't be explained. Arnold, however, had sold
his story to Fate magazine and in the same issue of Fate were stories with
such titles as "Behind the Etheric Veil" and "Invisible Beings Walk the
Earth," suggesting that Arnold's story might fall into the same category. The
sightings where the Air Force had the answer had detailed explanations. The
ones that were unknowns were mentioned, but only in passing.

Many famous names were quoted. The late General Hoyt S. Vanden-berg,
then Chief of Staff of the Air Force, had seen a flying saucer but it was just
a reflection on the windshield of his B-17. General Lauris Norstad's UFO
was a reflection of a star on a cloud, and General Curtis E. Le May found
out that one out of six UFO's was a balloon; Colonel McCoy, then chief of
ATIC, had seen lots of UFO's. All were reflections from distant airplanes. In

other words, nobody who is anybody in the Air Force believes in flying
saucers.

Figures in the top echelons of the military had spoken.

A few hoaxes and crackpot reports rounded out Mr. Shallet's article.

The reaction to the article wasn't what the Air Force and ATIC expected.
They had thought that the public would read the article and toss it, and all
thoughts of UFO's, into the trash can. But they didn't. Within a few days the
frequency of UFO reports hit an all- time high. People, both military and
civilian, evidently didn't much care what Generals Vandenberg, Norstad, Le
May, or Colonel McCoy thought; they didn't believe what they were seeing
were hallucinations, reflections, or balloons. What they were seeing were
UFO's, whatever UFO's might be.

I heard many times from ex-Project Grudge people that Shallet had
"crossed" them, he'd vaguely mentioned that there might be a case for the
UFO. This made him pro-saucer.

A few days after the last installment of the Post article the Air
Force gave out a long and detailed press release completely debunking
UFO's, but this had no effect. It only seemed to add to the confusion.

The one thing that Shallet's article accomplished was to plant a seed of
doubt in many people's minds. Was the Air Force telling the truth about
UFO's? The public and a large percentage of the military didn't know what
was going on behind ATIC's barbed-wire fence but they did know that a lot
of reliable people had seen UFO's. Airline pilots are considered responsible
people—airline pilots had seen UFO's. Experienced military pilots and
ground officers are responsible people—they'd seen UFO's. Scientists,
doctors, lawyers, merchants, and plain old Joe Doakes had seen UFO's, and

their friends knew that they were responsible people. Somehow these facts
and the tone of the Post article didn't quite jibe, and when things don't jibe,
people get suspicious.

In those people who had a good idea of what was going on behind ATIC's
barbed wire, the newspaper reporters and writers with the "usually reliable
sources," the Post article planted a bigger seed of doubt. Why the sudden
change in policy they wondered? If UFO's were so serious a few months
ago, why the sudden debunking? Maybe Shallet's story was a put-up job for
the Air Force. Maybe the security had been tightened. Their sources of
information were reporting that many people in the military did not quite
buy the Shallet article. The seed of doubt began to grow, and some of these
writers began to start "independent investigations" to get the "true" story.
Research takes time, so during the summer and fall of 1949 there wasn't
much apparent UFO activity.

As the writers began to poke around for their own facts, Project Grudge
lapsed more and more into a period of almost complete inactivity. Good
UFO reports continued to come in at the rate of about ten per month but
they weren't being verified or investigated. Most of them were being
discarded. There are few, if any, UFO reports for the middle and latter part
of 1949 in the ATIC files. Only the logbook, showing incoming reports,
gives any idea of the activity of this period. The meager effort that was
being made was going into a report that evaluated old UFO reports, those
received prior to the spring of 1949. Project Grudge thought that they were
writing a final report on the UFO's.

From the small bits of correspondence and memos that were in the ATIC
files, it was apparent that Project Grudge thought that the UFO was on its
way out. Any writers inquiring about UFO activity were referred to the
debunking press release given out just after the Post article had been

published. There was no more to say. Project Grudge thought they were
winning the UFO battle; the writers thought that they were covering up a
terrific news story—the story that the Air Force knew what flying saucers
were and weren't telling.

By late fall 1949 the material for several UFO stories had been collected
by writers who had been traveling all over the United States talking to
people who had seen UFO's. By early winter the material had been worked
up into UFO stories. In December the presses began to roll. True magazine
"scooped" the world with their story that UFO's were from outer space.

The True article, entitled, "The Flying Saucers Are Real," was written by
Donald Keyhoe. The article opened with a hard punch. In the first
paragraph Keyhoe concluded that after eight months of extensive research
he had found evidence that the earth was being closely scrutinized by
intelligent beings. Their vehicles were the so- called flying saucers. Then he
proceeded to prove his point. His argument was built around the three
classics: the Mantell, the Chiles- Whitted, and the Gorman incidents. He
took each sighting, detailed the "facts," ripped the official Air Force
conclusions to shreds, and presented his own analysis. He threw in a varied
assortment of technical facts that gave the article a distinct, authoritative
flavor. This, combined with the fact that True had the name for printing the
truth, hit the reading public like an 8-inch howitzer. Hours after it appeared
in subscribers' mailboxes and on the newsstands, radio and TV
commentators and newspapers were giving it a big play. UFO's were back
in business, to stay. True was in business too. It is rumored among
magazine publishers that Don Keyhoe's article in True was one of the most
widely read and widely discussed magazine articles in history.

The Air Force had inadvertently helped Keyhoe—in fact, they made his
story a success. He and several other writers had contacted the Air Force

asking for information for their magazine articles. But, knowing that the
articles were pro-saucer, the writers were unceremoniously sloughed off.
Keyhoe carried his fight right to the top, to General Sory Smith, Director of
the Office of Public Information, but still no dice—the Air Force wasn't
divulging any more than they had already told. Keyhoe construed this to
mean tight security, the tightest type of security. Keyhoe had one more
approach, however. He was an ex-Annapolis graduate, and among his
classmates were such people as Admiral Delmar Fahrney, then a top figure
in the Navy guided missile program and Admiral Calvin Bolster, the
Director of the Office of Naval Research. He went to see them but they
couldn't help him. He knew that this meant the real UFO story was big and
that it could be only one thing—interplanetary spaceships or earthly
weapons—and his contacts denied they were earthly weapons. He played
this security angle in his True article and in a later book, and it gave the
story the needed punch.

But the Air Force wasn't trying to cover up. It was just that they didn't
want Keyhoe or any other saucer fans in their hair. They couldn't be
bothered. They didn't believe in flying saucers and couldn't feature anybody
else believing. Believing, to the people in ATIC in 1949, meant even raising
the possibility that there might be something to the reports.

The Air Force had a plan to counter the Keyhoe article, or any other story
that might appear. The plan originated at ATIC. It called for a general
officer to hold a short press conference, flash his stars, and speak the magic
words "hoaxes, hallucinations, and the misidentification of known objects,"
True, Keyhoe and the rest would go broke trying to peddle their magazines.
The True article did come out, the general spoke, the public laughed, and
Keyhoe and True got rich. Only the other magazines that had planned to run
UFO stories, and that were scooped by True, lost out. Their stories were
killed—they would have been an anti-climax to Keyhoe's potboiler.

The Air Force's short press conference was followed by a press release.
On December 27, 1949, it was announced that Project Grudge had been
closed out and the final report on UFO's would be released to the press in a
few days. When it was released it caused widespread interest because,
supposedly, this was all that the Air Force knew about UFO's. Once again,
instead of throwing large amounts of cold water on the UFO's, it only
caused more confusion.

The report was officially titled "Unidentified Flying Objects— Project
Grudge," Technical Report No. 102-AC-49/15-100. But it was widely
referred to as the Grudge Report.

The Grudge Report was a typical military report. There was the body of
the report, which contained the short discussion, conclusions, and
recommendations. Then there were several appendixes that were supposed
to substantiate the conclusions and recommendations made in the report.

One of the appendixes was the final report of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project
Grudge's contract astronomer. Dr. Hynek and his staff had studied 237 of
the best UFO reports. They had spent several months analyzing each report.
By searching through astronomical journals and checking the location of
various celestial bodies, they found that some UFO's could be explained. Of
the 237 reports he and his staff examined, 32 per cent could be explained
astronomically.

The Air Force Air Weather Service and the Air Force Cambridge
Research Laboratory had sifted the reports for UFO's that might have been
balloons. These two organizations had data on the flights of both the regular
weather balloons and the huge, high-flying skyhooks. They wrote off 12 per
cent of the 237 UFO reports under study as balloons.

This left 56 per cent still unknown. By weeding out the hoaxes, the
reports that were too nebulous to evaluate, and reports that could well be
misidentified airplanes, Project Grudge disposed of another 33 per cent of
the reports. This left 23 per cent that fell in the "unknown" category.

There were more appendixes. The Rand Corporation, one of the most
unpublicized yet highly competent contractors to the Air Force, looked over
the reports and made the statement, "We have found nothing which would
seriously controvert simple rational explanations of the various phenomena
in terms of balloons, conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, bits of paper,
optical illusions, practical jokers, psychopathological reporters, and the
like." But Rand's comment didn't help a great deal because they didn't come
up with any solutions to any of the 23 per cent unknown.

The Psychology Branch of the Air Force's Aeromedical Laboratory took
a pass at the psychological angles. They said, "there are sufficient
psychological explanations for the reports of unidentified objects to provide
plausible explanations for reports not otherwise explainable." They pointed
out that some people have "spots in front of their eyes" due to minute solid
particles that float about in the fluids of the eye and cast shadows on the
retina. Then they pointed out that some people are just plain nuts. Many
people who read the Grudge Report took these two points to mean that all
UFO observers either had spots in front of their eyes or were nuts. They
broke the reports down statistically. The people who wrote the report found
that over 70 per cent of the people making sightings reported a light-
colored object. (This I doubt, but that's what the report said.) They said a
big point of these reports of light-colored objects was that any high-flying
object will appear to be dark against the sky. For this reason the UFO's
couldn't be real.

I suggest that the next time you are outdoors and see a bomber go over at
high altitude you look at it closely. Unless it's painted a dark color it won't
look dark.

The U.S. Weather Bureau wrote an extremely comprehensive and
interesting report on all types of lightning. It was included in the Grudge
Report but contained a note: "None of the recorded incidents appear to have
been lightning."

There was one last appendix. It was entitled "Summary of the Evaluation
of Remaining Reports." What the title meant was, We have 23 per cent of
the reports that we can't explain but we have to explain them because we
don't believe in flying saucers. This appendix contributed greatly to the
usage of the analogy to the Dark Ages, the age of "intellectual stagnation."

This appendix was important—it was the meat of the whole report. Every
UFO sighting had been carefully checked, and those with answers had been
sifted out. Then the ones listed in "Summary of the Evaluation of
Remaining Reports" should be the best UFO reports—the ones with no
answers.

This was the appendix that the newsmen grabbed at when the Grudge
Report was released. It contained the big story. But if you'll check back
through old newspaper files you will hardly find a mention of the Grudge
Report.

I was told that reporters just didn't believe it when I tried to find out why
the Grudge Report hadn't been mentioned in the newspapers. I got the story
from a newspaper correspondent in Washington whom I came to know
pretty well and who kept me filled in on the latest UFO scuttlebutt being
passed around the Washington press circles. He was one of those humans

who had a brain like a filing cabinet; he could remember everything about
everything. UFO's were a hobby of his. He remembered when the Grudge
Report came out; in fact, he'd managed to get a copy of his own. He said the
report had been quite impressive, but only in its ambiguousness, illogical
reasoning, and very apparent effort to write off all UFO reports at any cost.
He, personally, thought that it was a poor attempt to put out a "fake" report,
full of misleading information, to cover up the real story. Others, he told
me, just plainly and simply didn't know what to think—they were confused.

And they had every right to be confused.

As an example of the way that many of the better reports of the 1947- 49
period were "evaluated" let's take the report of a pilot who tangled with a
UFO near Washington, D.C., on the night of November 18, 1948.

At about 9:45 EST I noticed a light moving generally north to south over
Andrews AFB. It appeared to be one continuous, glowing white light. I
thought it was an aircraft with only one landing light so I moved in closer to
check, as I wanted to get into the landing pattern. I was well above landing
traffic altitude at this time. As I neared the light I noticed that it was not
another airplane. Just then it began to take violent evasive action so I tried
to close on it. I made first contact at 2,700 feet over the field. I switched my
navigation lights on and off but got no answer so I went in closer— but the
light quickly flew up and over my airplane. I then tried to close again but
the light turned. I tried to turn inside of its turn and, at the same time, get
the light between the moon and me, but even with my flaps lowered I
couldn't turn inside the light. I never did manage to get into a position
where the light was silhouetted against the moon.

I chased the light up and down and around for about 10 minutes, then as
a last resort I made a pass and turned on my landing lights. Just before the
object made a final tight turn and headed for the coast I saw that it was a

dark gray oval-shaped object, smaller than my T-6. I couldn't tell if the light
was on the object or if the whole object had been glowing.

Two officers and a crew chief, a master sergeant, completely
corroborated the pilot's report. They had been standing on the flight line and
had witnessed the entire incident.

The Air Weather Service, who had been called in as experts on weather
balloons, read this report. They said, "Definitely not a balloon." Dr. Hynek
said, "No astronomical explanation." It wasn't another airplane and it wasn't
a hallucination.

But Project Grudge had an answer, it was a weather balloon. There was
no explanation as to why they had so glibly reversed the decision of the Air
Weather Service.

There was an answer for every report.

From the 600 pages of appendixes, discussions of the appendixes, and
careful studies of UFO reports, it was concluded that:

Evaluation of reports of unidentified flying objects constitute no direct
threat to the national security of the United States.

Reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of:

A mild form of mass hysteria or "war nerves."

Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetrate a hoax or seek
publicity.

Psychopathological persons.

Misidentification of various conventional objects.

It was recommended that Project Grudge be "reduced in scope" and that
only "those reports clearly indicating realistic technical applications" be
sent to Grudge. There was a note below these recommendations. It said, "It
is readily apparent that further study along present lines would only confirm
the findings presented herein."

Somebody read the note and concurred because with the completion and
approval of the Grudge Report, Project Grudge folded. People could rant
and rave, see flying saucers, pink elephants, sea serpents, or Harvey, but it
was no concern of ATIC's.

CHAPTER SIX

The Presses Roll—The Air Force Shrugs

The Grudge Report was supposedly not for general distribution. A few
copies were sent to the Air Force Press Desk in the Pentagon and reporters
and writers could come in and read it. But a good many copies did get into
circulation. The Air Force Press Room wasn't the best place to sit and study
a 600-page report, and a quick glance at the report showed that it required
some study—if no more than to find out what the authors were trying to
prove—so several dozen copies got into circulation. I know that these
"liberated" copies of the Grudge Report had been thoroughly studied
because nearly every writer who came to ATIC during the time that I was in
charge of Project Blue Book carried a copy.

Since the press had some questions about the motives behind releasing
the Grudge Report, it received very little publicity while the writers put out
feelers. Consequently in early 1950 you didn't read much about flying
saucers.

Evidently certain people in the Air Force thought this lull in publicity
meant that the UFO's had finally died because Project Grudge was junked.
All the project files, hundreds of pounds of reports, memos, photos,
sketches, and other assorted bits of paper were unceremoniously yanked out
of their filing cabinets, tied up with string, and chucked into an old storage
case. I would guess that many reports ended up as "souvenirs" because a
year later, when I exhumed these files, there were a lot of reports missing.

About this time the official Air Force UFO project had one last post-
death muscular spasm. The last bundle of reports had just landed on top of
the pile in the storage case when ATIC received a letter from the Director of
Intelligence of the Air Force. In official language it said, "What gives?"
There had been no order to end Project Grudge. The answer went back that
Project Grudge had not been disbanded; the project functions had been
transferred and it was no longer a "special" project. From now on UFO
reports would be processed through normal intelligence channels along with
other intelligence reports.

To show good faith ATIC requested permission to issue a new Air Force-
wide bulletin which was duly mimeographed and disseminated. In essence
it said that Air Force Headquarters had directed ATIC to continue to collect
and evaluate reports of unidentified flying objects. It went on to explain that
most UFO reports were trash. It pointed out the findings of the Grudge
Report in such strong language that by the time the recipient of the bulletin
had finished reading it, he would be ashamed to send in a report. To cinch
the deal the bulletins must have been disseminated only to troops in Outer
Mongolia because I never found anyone in the field who had ever received
a copy.

As the Air Force UFO-investigating activity dropped to nil, the press
activity skyrocketed to a new peak. A dozen people took off to dig up their

own UFO stories and to draw their own conclusions.

After a quiet January, True again clobbered the reading public. This time
it was a story in the March 1950 issue and it was entitled, "How Scientists
Tracked Flying Saucers." It was written by none other than the man who
was at that time in charge of a team of Navy scientists at the super hush-
hush guided missile test and development area, White Sands Proving
Ground, New Mexico. He was Commander R. B. McLaughlin, an
Annapolis graduate and a Regular Navy officer. His story had been cleared
by the military and was in absolute, 180- degree, direct contradiction to
every press release that had been made by the military in the past two years.
Not only did the commander believe that he had proved that UFO's were
real but that he knew what they were. "I am convinced," he wrote in the
True article, "that it," referring to a UFO he had seen at White Sands, "was a
flying saucer, and further, that these disks are spaceships from another
planet, operated by animate, intelligent beings."

On several occasions during 1948 and 1949, McLaughlin or his crew at
the White Sands Proving Ground had made good UFO sightings. The best
one was made on April 24, 1949, when the commander's crew of engineers,
scientists, and technicians were getting ready to launch one of the huge 100-
foot-diameter skyhook balloons. It was 10:30A.M. on an absolutely clear
Sunday morning. Prior to the launching, the crew had sent up a small
weather balloon to check the winds at lower levels. One man was watching
the balloon through a theodolite, an instrument similar to a surveyor's
transit built around a 25-power telescope, one man was holding a stop
watch, and a third had a clipboard to record the measured data. The crew
had tracked the balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly
shouted and pointed off to the left. The whole crew looked at the part of the
sky where the man was excitedly pointing, and there was a UFO. "It didn't
appear to be large," one of the scientists later said, "but it was plainly

visible. It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape and had a 'whitish-
silver color.'" After taking a split second to realize what they were looking
at, one of the men swung the theodolite around to pick up the object, and
the timer reset his stop watch. For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it
moved toward the east. In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped from an
angle of elevation of 45 degrees to 25 degrees, then it zoomed upward and
in a few seconds it was out of sight. The crew heard no sound and the New
Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard "a whisper a
mile away."

When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew
found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second. At one
time during the observed portion of its flight, the UFO had passed in front
of a range of mountains that were visible to the observers. Using this as a
check point, they estimated the size of the UFO to be 40 feet wide and 100
feet long, and they computed that the UFO had been at an altitude of
296,000 feet, or 56 miles, when they had first seen it, and that it was
traveling 7 miles per second.

This wasn't the only UFO sighting made by White Sands scientists. On
April 5, 1948, another team watched a UFO for several minutes as it
streaked across the afternoon sky in a series of violent maneuvers.
The disk-shaped object was about a fifth the size of a full moon.

On another occasion the crew of a C-47 that was tracking a skyhook
balloon saw two similar UFO's come loping in from just above the horizon,
circle the balloon, which was flying at just under 90,000 feet, and rapidly
leave. When the balloon was recovered it was ripped.

I knew the two pilots of the C-47; both of them now believe in flying
saucers. And they aren't alone; so do the people of the Aeronautical
Division of General Mills who launch and track the big skyhook balloons.

These scientists and engineers all have seen UFO's and they aren't their own
balloons. I was almost tossed out of the General Mills offices into a cold
January Minneapolis snowstorm for suggesting such a thing—but that
comes later in our history of the UFO.

I don't know what these people saw. There has been a lot of interest
generated by these sightings because of the extremely high qualifications
and caliber of the observers. There is some legitimate doubt as to the
accuracy of the speed and altitude figures that McLaughlin's crew arrived at
from the data they measured with their theodolite. This doesn't mean much,
however. Even if they were off by a factor of 100 per cent, the speeds and
altitudes would be fantastic, and besides they looked at the UFO through a
25-power telescope and swore that it was a flat, oval-shaped object.
Balloons, birds, and airplanes aren't flat and oval-shaped.

Astrophysicist Dr. Donald Menzel, in a book entitled Flying Saucers,
says they saw a refracted image of their own balloon caused by an
atmospheric phenomenon. Maybe he is right, but the General Mills people
don't believe it. And their disagreement is backed up by years of practical
experience with the atmosphere, its tricks and its illusions.

When the March issue of True magazine carrying Commander
McLaughlin's story about how the White Sands Scientists had tracked
UFO's reached the public, it stirred up a hornets' nest. Donald Keyhoe's
article in the January True had converted many people but there were still a
few heathens. The fact that government scientists had seen UFO's, and were
admitting it, took care of a large percentage of these heathens. More and
more people were believing in flying saucers.

The Navy had no comment to make about the sightings, but they did
comment on McLaughlin. It seems that several months before, at the
suggestion of a group of scientists at White Sands, McLaughlin had

carefully written up the details of the sightings and forwarded them to
Washington. The report contained no personal opinions, just facts. The
comments on McLaughlin's report had been wired back to White Sands
from Washington and they were, "What are you drinking out there?" A very
intelligent answer—and it came from an admiral in the Navy's guided
missile program.

By the time his story was published, McLaughlin was no longer at White
Sands; he was at sea on the destroyer Bristol. Maybe he answered the
admiral's wire.

The Air Force had no comment to make on McLaughlin's story. People at
ATIC just shrugged and smiled as they walked by the remains of Project
Grudge, and continued to "process UFO reports through regular intelligence
channels."

In early 1950 the UFO's moved down to Mexico. The newspapers were
full of reports. Tourists were bringing back more saucer stories than hand-
tooled, genuine leather purses. Time reported that pickpockets were doing a
fabulous business working the sky-gazing crowds that gathered when a
plativolo was seen. Mexico's Department of National Defense reported that
there had been some good reports but that the stories of finding crashed
saucers weren't true.

On March 8 one of the best UFO sightings of 1950 took place right over
ATIC.

About midmorning on this date a TWA airliner was coming in to land at
the Dayton Municipal Airport. As the pilot circled to get into the traffic
pattern, he and his copilot saw a bright light hovering off to the southeast.
The pilot called the tower operators at the airport to tell them about the
light, but before he could say anything, the tower operators told him they

were looking at it too. They had called the operations office of the Ohio Air
National Guard, which was located at the airport, and while the tower
operators were talking, an Air Guard pilot was running toward an F-51,
dragging his parachute, helmet, and oxygen mask.

I knew the pilot, and he later told me, "I wanted to find out once and for
all what these screwy flying saucer reports were all about."

While the F-51 was warming up, the tower operators called ATIC and
told them about the UFO and where to look to see it. The people at ATIC
rushed out and there it was—an extremely bright light, much brighter and
larger than a star. Whatever it was, it was high because every once in a
while it would be blanked out by the thick, high, scattered clouds that were
in the area. While the group of people were standing in front of ATIC
watching the light, somebody ran in and called the radar lab at Wright Field
to see if they had any radar "on the air." The people in the lab said that they
didn't have, but they could get operational in a hurry. They said they would
search southeast of the field with their radar and suggested that ATIC send
some people over. By the time the ATIC people arrived at the radar lab the
radar was on the air and had a target in the same position as the light that
everyone was looking at. The radar was also picking up the Air Guard F-51
and an F-51 that had been scrambled from Wright- Patterson. The pilots of
the Air Guard '51 and the Wright-Patterson '51 could both see the UFO, and
they were going after it. The master sergeant who was operating the radar
called the F-51's on the radio, got them together and started to vector them
toward the target. As the two airplanes climbed they kept up a continual
conversation with the radar operator to make sure they were all after the
same thing. For several minutes they could clearly see the UFO, but when
they reached about 15,000 feet, the clouds moved in and they lost it. The
pilots made a quick decision; since radar showed that they were getting
closer to the target, they decided to spread out to keep from colliding with

one another and to go up through the clouds. They went on instruments and
in a few seconds they were in the cloud. It was much worse than they'd
expected; the cloud was thick, and the airplanes were icing up fast. An F-51
is far from being a good instrument ship, but they stayed in their climb until
radar called and said that they were close to the target; in fact, almost on it.
The pilots had another hurried radio conference and decided that since the
weather was so bad they'd better come down. If a UFO, or something, was
in the clouds, they'd hit it before they could see it. So they made a wise
decision; they dropped the noses of their airplanes and dove back down into
the clear. They circled awhile but the clouds didn't break. In a few minutes
the master sergeant on the radar reported that the target was fading fast. The
F-51's went in and landed.

When the target faded on the radar, some of the people went outside to
visually look for the UFO, but it was obscured by clouds, and the clouds
stayed for an hour. When it finally did clear for a few minutes, the UFO was
gone.

A conference was held at ATIC that afternoon. It included Roy James,
ATIC's electronics specialist and expert on radar UFO's. Roy had been over
at the radar lab and had seen the UFO on the scope but neither the F-51
pilots nor the master sergeant who operated the radar were at the
conference. The records show that at this meeting a unanimous decision
was reached as to the identity of the UFO's. The bright light was Venus
since Venus was in the southeast during midmorning on March 8, 1950, and
the radar return was caused by the ice-laden cloud that the F-51 pilots had
encountered. Ice-laden clouds can cause a radar return. The group of
intelligence specialists at the meeting decided that this was further proved
by the fact that as the F-51's approached the center of the cloud their radar
return appeared to approach the UFO target on the radarscope. They were
near the UFO and near ice, so the UFO must have been ice.

The case was closed.

I had read the report of this sighting but I hadn't paid too much attention
to it because it had been "solved." But one day almost two years later I got a
telephone call at my office at Project Blue Book. It was a master sergeant,
the master sergeant who had been operating the radar at the lab. He'd just
heard that the Air Force was again seriously investigating UFO's and he
wanted to see what had been said about the Dayton Incident. He came over,
read the report, and violently disagreed with what had been decided upon as
the answer. He said that he'd been working with radar before World War II;
he'd helped with the operational tests on the first microwave warning radars
developed early in the war by a group headed by Dr. Luis Alvarez. He said
that what he saw on that radarscope was no ice cloud; it was some type of
aircraft. He'd seen every conceivable type of weather target on radar, he told
me; thunderstorms, ice-laden clouds, targets caused by temperature
inversions, and the works. They all had similar characteristics—the target
was "fuzzy" and varied in intensity. But in this case the target was a good,
solid return and he was convinced that it was caused by a good, solid
object. And besides, he said, when the target began to fade on his scope he
had raised the tilt of the antenna and the target came back, indicating that
whatever it was, it was climbing. Ice-laden clouds don't climb, he
commented rather bitterly.

Nor did the pilot of one of the F-51's agree with the ATIC analysis. The
pilot who had been leading the two-ship flight of F-51's on that day told me
that what he saw was no planet. While he and his wing man were climbing,
and before the clouds obscured it, they both got a good look at the UFO,
and it was getting bigger and more distinct all the time. As they climbed,
the light began to take on a shape; it was definitely round. And if it had
been Venus it should have been in the same part of the sky the next day, but

the pilot said that he'd looked and it wasn't there. The ATIC report doesn't
mention this point.

I remember asking him a second time what the UFO looked like; he said,
"huge and metallic"—shades of the Mantell Incident.

The Dayton Incident didn't get much of a play from the press because
officially it wasn't an unknown and there's nothing intriguing about an ice
cloud and Venus. There were UFO reports in the newspapers, however.

One story that was widely printed was about a sighting at the naval air
station at Dallas, Texas. Just before noon on March 16, Chief Petty Officer
Charles Lewis saw a disk-shaped UFO come streaking across the sky and
buzz a high-flying B-36. Lewis first saw the UFO coming in from the north,
lower than the B-36; then he saw it pull up to the big bomber as it got
closer. It hovered under the B-36 for an instant, then it went speeding off
and disappeared. When the press inquired about the incident, Captain M. A.
Nation, commander of the air station, vouched for his chief and added that
the base tower operators had seen and reported a UFO to him about ten
days before.

This story didn't run long because the next day a bigger one broke when
the sky over the little town of Farmington, New Mexico, about 170 miles
northwest of Albuquerque, was literally invaded by UFO's. Every major
newspaper carried the story. The UFO's had apparently been congregating
over the four corners area for two days because several people had reported
seeing UFO's on March 15 and 16. But the seventeenth was the big day,
every saucer this side of Polaris must have made a successful rendezvous
over Farmington, because on that day most of the town's 3,600 citizens saw
the mass fly-by. The first reports were made at 10:15A.M.; then for an hour
the air was full of flying saucers. Estimates of the number varied from a
conservative 500 to "thousands." Most all the observers said the UFO's

were saucer- shaped, traveled at almost unbelievable speeds, and didn't
seem to have any set flight path. They would dart in and out and seemed to
avoid collisions only by inches. There was no doubt that they weren't
hallucinations because the mayor, the local newspaper staff, ex- pilots, the
highway patrol, and every type of person who makes up a community of
3,600 saw them.

I've talked to several people who were in Farmington and saw this now
famous UFO display of St. Patrick's Day, 1950. I've heard dozens of
explanations—cotton blowing in the wind, bugs' wings reflecting sunlight,
a hoax to put Farmington on the map, and real honest-to- goodness flying
saucers. One explanation was never publicized, however, and if there is an
explanation, it is the best. Under certain conditions of extreme cold,
probably 50 to 60 degrees below zero, the plastic bag of a skyhook balloon
will get very brittle, and will take on the characteristics of a huge light bulb.
If a sudden gust of wind or some other disturbance hits the balloon, it will
shatter into a thousand pieces. As these pieces of plastic float down and are
carried along by the wind, they could look like thousands of flying saucers.

On St. Patrick's Day a skyhook balloon launched from Holloman AFB,
adjacent to the White Sands Proving Ground, did burst near Farmington,
and it was cold enough at 60,000 feet to make the balloon brittle. True, the
people at Farmington never found any pieces of plastic, but the small pieces
of plastic are literally as light as feathers and could have floated far beyond
the city.

The next day, on March 18, the Air Force, prodded by the press, shrugged
and said, "There's nothing to it," but they had no explanation.

True magazine came through for a third time when their April issue,
which was published during the latter part of March 1950, carried a
roundup of UFO photos. They offered seven photos as proof that UFO's

existed. It didn't take a photo-interpretation expert to tell that all seven
could well be of doubtful lineage, nevertheless the collection of photos
added fuel to the already smoldering fire. The U.S. public was hearing a lot
about flying saucers and all of it was on the pro side. For somebody who
didn't believe in the things, the public thought that the Air Force was being
mighty quiet.

The subject took on added interest on the night of March 26, when a
famous news commentator said the UFO's were from Russia.

The next night Henry J. Taylor, in a broadcast from Dallas, Texas, said
that the UFO's were Uncle Sam's own. He couldn't tell all he knew, but a
flying saucer had been found on the beach near Galveston, Texas. It had
USAF markings.

Two nights later a Los Angeles television station cut into a regular
program with a special news flash; later in the evening the announcer said
they would show the first photos of the real thing, our military's flying
saucer. The photos turned out to be of the Navy XF- 5-U, a World War II
experimental aircraft that never flew.

The public was now thoroughly confused.

By now the words "flying saucer" were being batted around by every
newspaper reporter, radio and TV newscaster, comedian, and man on the
street. Some of the comments weren't complimentary, but as Theorem I of
the publicity racket goes, "It doesn't make any difference what's said as long
as the name's spelled right."

Early in April the publication that is highly revered by so many, U.S.
News and World Report, threw in their lot. The UFO's belonged to the
Navy. Up popped the old non-flying XF-5-U again.

Events drifted back to normal when Edward R. Murrow made UFO's the
subject of one of his TV documentaries. He took his viewers around the
U.S., talked to Kenneth Arnold, of original UFO fame, by phone and got the
story of Captain Mantell's death from a reporter "who was there."
Sandwiched in between accounts of actual UFO sightings were the pro and
con opinions of top Washington brass, scientists, and the man on the street.

Even the staid New York Times, which had until now stayed out of
UFO controversy, broke down and ran an editorial entitled, "Those
Flying Saucers—Are They or Aren't They?"

All of this activity did little to shock the military out of their dogma.
They admitted that the UFO investigation really hadn't been discontinued.
"Any substantial reports of any unusual aerial phenomena would be
processed through normal intelligence channels," they told the press.

Ever since July 4, 1947, ten days after the first flying saucer report,
airline pilots had been reporting that they had seen UFO's. But the reports
weren't frequent—maybe one every few months. In the spring of 1950 this
changed, however, and the airline pilots began to make more and more
reports—good reports. The reports went to ATIC but they didn't receive
much attention. In a few instances there was a semblance of an
investigation but it was halfhearted. The reports reached the newspapers
too, and here they received a great deal more attention. The reports were
investigated, and the stories checked and rechecked. When airline crews
began to turn in one UFO report after another, it was difficult to believe the
old "hoax, hallucination, and misidentification of known objects" routine. In
April, May, and June of 1950 there were over thirty-five good reports from
airline crews.

One of these was a report from a Chicago and Southern crew who were
flying a DC-3 from Memphis to Little Rock, Arkansas, on the night of

March 31. It was an exceptionally clear night, no clouds or haze, a
wonderful night to fly. At exactly nine twenty-nine by the cockpit clock the
pilot, a Jack Adams, noticed a white light off to his left. The copilot, G. W.
Anderson, was looking at the chart but out of the corner of his eye he saw
the pilot lean forward and look out the window, so he looked out too. He
saw the light just as the pilot said, "What's that?"

The copilot's answer was classic: "No, not one of those things."

Both pilots had only recently voiced their opinions regarding the flying
saucers and they weren't complimentary.

As they watched the UFO, it passed across the nose of their DC-3 and
they got a fairly good look at it. Neither the pilot nor the copilot was
positive of the object's shape because it was "shadowy" but they assumed it
was disk-shaped because of the circular arrangement of eight or ten
"portholes," each one glowing from a strong bluish-white light that seemed
to come from the inside of whatever it was that they saw. The UFO also had
a blinking white light on top, a fact that led many people to speculate that
this UFO was another airliner. But this idea was quashed when it was
announced that there were no other airliners in the area. The crew of the
DC-3, when questioned on this possibility, were definite in their answers. If
it had been another airplane, they could have read the number, seen the
passengers, and darn near reached out and slugged the pilot for getting so
close to them.

About a month later, over northern Indiana, TWA treated all the
passengers of one of their DC-3 nights to a view of a UFO that looked like
a "big glob of molten metal."

The official answer for this incident is that the huge orange-red UFO was
nothing more than the light from the many northern Indiana blast furnaces

reflecting a haze layer. Could be, but the pilots say no.

There were similar sightings in North Korea two years later—and
FEAF Bomber Command had caused a shortage of blast furnaces in North
Korea.

UFO sightings by airline pilots always interested me as much as any type
of sighting. Pilots in general should be competent observers simply because
they spend a large part of their lives looking around the sky. And pilots do
look; one of the first things an aviation cadet is taught is to "Keep your head
on a swivel"; in other words, keep looking around the sky. Of all the pilots,
the airline pilots are the cream of this group of good observers. Possibly
some second lieutenant just out of flying school could be confused by some
unusual formation of ground lights, a meteor, or a star, but airline pilots
have flown thousands of hours or they wouldn't be sitting in the left seat of
an airliner, and they should be familiar with a host of unusual sights.

One afternoon in February 1953 I had an opportunity to further my study
of UFO sightings by airline pilots. I had been out at Air Defense Command
Headquarters in Colorado Springs and was flying back East on a United
Airlines DC-6. There weren't many passengers on the airplane that
afternoon but, as usual, the captain came strolling back through the cabin to
chat. When he got to me he sat down in the next seat. We talked a few
minutes; then I asked him what he knew about flying saucers. He sort of
laughed and said that a dozen people a week asked that question, but when I
told him who I was and why I was interested, his attitude changed. He said
that he'd never seen a UFO but he knew a lot of pilots on United who had.
One man, he told me, had seen one several years ago. He'd reported it but
he had been sloughed off like the rest. But he was so convinced that he'd
seen something unusual that he'd gone out and bought a Leica camera with

a 105-mm. telephoto lens, learned how to use it, and now he carried it
religiously during his flights.

There was a lull in the conversation, then the captain said, "Do you really
want to get an opinion about flying saucers?"

I said I did.

"O.K.," I remember his saying, "how much of a layover do you have in
Chicago?"

I had about two hours.

"All right, as soon as we get to Chicago I'll meet you at Caffarello's,
across the street from the terminal building. I'll see who else is in and I'll
bring them along."

I thanked him and he went back up front.

I waited around the bar at Caffarello's for an hour. I'd just about decided
that he wasn't going to make it and that I'd better get back to catch my flight
to Dayton when he and three other pilots came in. We got a big booth in the
coffee shop because he'd called three more off-duty pilots who lived in
Chicago and they were coming over too. I don't remember any of the men's
names because I didn't make any attempt to. This was just an informal bull
session and not an official interrogation, but I really got the scoop on what
airline pilots think about UFO's.

First of all they didn't pull any punches about what they thought about
the Air Force and its investigation of UFO reports. One of the men got right
down to the point: "If I saw a flying saucer flying wing-tip formation with
me and could see little men waving—even if my whole load of passengers
saw it—I wouldn't report it to the Air Force."

Another man cut in, "Remember the thing Jack Adams said he saw down
by Memphis?"

I said I did.

"He reported that to the Air Force and some red-hot character met him in
Memphis on his next trip. He talked to Adams a few minutes and then told
him that he'd seen a meteor. Adams felt like a fool. Hell, I know Jack
Adams well and he's the most conservative guy I know. If he said he saw
something with glowing portholes, he saw something with glowing
portholes—and it wasn't a meteor."

Even though I didn't remember the pilots' names I'll never forget their
comments. They didn't like the way the Air Force had handled UFO reports
and I was the Air Force's "Mr. Flying Saucer." As quickly as one of the
pilots would set me up and bat me down, the next one grabbed me off the
floor and took his turn. But I couldn't complain too much; I'd asked for it. I
think that this group of seven pilots pretty much represented the feelings of
a lot of the airline pilots. They weren't wide-eyed space fans, but they and
their fellow pilots had seen something and whatever they'd seen weren't
hallucinations, mass hysteria, balloons, or meteors.

Three of the men at the Caffarello conference had seen UFO's or, to use
their terminology, they had seen something they couldn't identify as a
known object. Two of these men had seen odd lights closely following their
airplanes at night. Both had checked and double- checked with CAA, but no
other aircraft was in the area. Both admitted, however, that they hadn't seen
enough to class what they'd seen as good UFO sighting. But the third man
had a lulu.

If I recall correctly, this pilot was flying for TWA. One day in March
1952 he, his copilot, and a third person who was either a pilot deadheading

home or another crew member, I don't recall which, were flying a C-54
cargo airplane from Chicago to Kansas City. At about 2:30P.M. the pilot
was checking in with the CAA radio at Kirksville, Missouri, flying 500 feet
on top of a solid overcast. While he was talking he glanced out at his No. 2
engine, which had been losing oil. Directly in line with it, and a few degrees
above, he saw a silvery, disk-shaped object. It was too far out to get a really
good look at it, yet it was close enough to be able definitely to make out the
shape.

The UFO held its relative position with the C-54 for five or six minutes;
then the pilot decided to do a little on-the-spot investigating himself. He
started a gradual turn toward the UFO and for about thirty seconds he was
getting closer, but then the UFO began to make a left turn. It had apparently
slowed down because they were still closing on it.

About this time the copilot decided that the UFO was a balloon; it just
looked as if the UFO was turning. The pilot agreed halfway—and since the
company wasn't paying them to intercept balloons, they got back on their
course to Kansas City. They flew on for a few more minutes with "the darn
thing" still off to their left. If it was a balloon, they should be leaving it
behind, the pilot recalled thinking to himself; if they made a 45-degree right
turn, the "balloon" shouldn't stay off the left wing; it should drop 'way
behind. So they made a 45-degree right turn, and although the "balloon"
dropped back a little bit, it didn't drop back far enough to be a balloon. It
seemed to put on speed to try to make a turn outside of the C-54's turn. The
pilot continued on around until he'd made a tight 360-degree turn, and the
UFO had followed, staying outside. They could not judge its speed, not
knowing how far away it was, but to follow even a C-54 around in a 360-
degree turn and to stay outside all of the time takes a mighty speedy object.

This shot the balloon theory right in the head. After the 360-degree turn
the UFO seemed to be gradually losing altitude because it was getting
below the level of the wings. The pilot decided to get a better look. He
asked for full power on all four engines, climbed several thousand feet, and
again turned into the UFO. He put the C-54 in a long glide, headed directly
toward it. As they closed in, the UFO seemed to lose altitude a little faster
and "sank" into the top of the overcast. Just as the C-54 flashed across the
spot where the UFO had disappeared, the crew saw it rise up out of the
overcast off their right wing and begin to climb so fast that in several
seconds it was out of sight.

Both the pilot and copilot wanted to stay around and look for it but
No. 2 engine had started to act up soon after they had put on full
power for the climb, and they decided that they'd better get into
Kansas City.

I missed my Dayton flight but I heard a good UFO story.

What had the two pilots and their passenger seen? We kicked it around
plenty that afternoon. It was no balloon. It wasn't another airplane because
when the pilot called Kirksville Radio he'd asked if there were any airplanes
in the area. It might possibly have been a reflection of some kind except
that when it "sank" into the overcast the pilot said it looked like something
sinking into an overcast—it just didn't disappear as a reflection would. Then
there was the sudden reappearance off the right wing. These are the types of
things you just can't explain.

What did the pilots think it was? Three were sold that the UFO's were
interplanetary spacecraft, one man was convinced that they were some U.S.
"secret weapon," and three of the men just shook their heads. So did I. We
all agreed on one thing—this pilot had seen something and it was
something highly unusual.

The meeting broke up about 9:00P.M. I'd gotten the personal and very
candid opinion of seven airline captains, and the opinions of half a hundred
more airline pilots had been quoted. I'd learned that the UFO's are discussed
often. I'd learned that many airline pilots take UFO sightings very seriously.
I learned that some believe they are interplanetary, some think they're a U.S.
weapon, and many just don't know. But very few are laughing off the good
sightings.

By May 1950 the flying saucer business had hit a new all-time peak.

The Air Force didn't take any side, they just shrugged. There was no
attempt to investigate and explain the various sightings. Maybe this was
because someone was afraid the answer would be "Unknown." Or maybe it
was because a few key officers thought that the eagles or stars on their
shoulders made them leaders of all men. If they didn't believe in flying
saucers and said so, it would be like calming the stormy Sea of Galilee. "It's
all a bunch of damned nonsense," an Air Force colonel who was controlling
the UFO investigation said. "There's no such thing as a flying saucer." He
went on to say that all people who saw flying saucers were jokers,
crackpots, or publicity hounds. Then he gave the airline pilots who'd been
reporting UFO's a reprieve. "They were just fatigued," he said. "What they
thought were spaceships were windshield reflections."

This was the unbiased processing of UFO reports through normal
intelligence channels.

But the U.S. public evidently had more faith in the "crackpot" scientists
who were spending millions of the public's dollars at the White Sands
Proving Grounds, in the "publicity-mad" military pilots, and the "tired, old"
airline pilots, because in a nationwide poll it was found that only 6 per cent
of the country's 150,697,361 people agreed with the colonel and said,
"There aren't such things."

Ninety-four per cent had different ideas.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Pentagon Rumbles

On June 25, 1950, the North Korean armies swept down across the 38th
parallel and the Korean War was on—the UFO was no longer a news item.
But the lady, or gentleman, who first said, "Out of sight is out of mind," had
never reckoned with the UFO.

On September 8, 1950, the UFO's were back in the news. On that day it
was revealed, via a book entitled Behind the Flying Saucers, that
government scientists had recovered and analyzed three different models of
flying saucers. And they were fantastic— just like the book. They were
made of an unknown super-duper metal and they were manned by little blue
uniformed men who ate concentrated food and drank heavy water. The
author of the book, Frank Scully, had gotten the story directly from a
millionaire oilman, Silas Newton. Newton had in turn heard the story from
an employee of his, a mysterious "Dr. Gee," one of the government
scientists who had helped analyze the crashed saucers.

The story made news, Newton and "Dr. Gee" made fame, and Scully
made money.

A little over two years later Newton and the man who was reportedly the
mysterious "Dr. Gee" again made the news. The Denver district attorney's
office had looked into the pair's oil business and found that the pockets they
were trying to tap didn't contain oil. According to the December 6, 1952,
issue of the Saturday Review, the D.A. had charged the two men with a

$50,000 con game. One of their $800,000 electronic devices for their oil
explorations turned out to be a $4.00 piece of war surplus junk.

Another book came out in the fall of 1950 when Donald Keyhoe
expanded his original UFO story that had first appeared in the January 1950
issue of True magazine. Next to Scully's book Keyhoe's book was tame, but
it convinced more people. Keyhoe had based his conjecture on fact, and his
facts were correct, even if the conjecture wasn't.

Neither the seesaw advances and retreats of the United Nations troops in
Korea nor the two flying saucer books seemed to have any effect on the
number of UFO reports logged into ATIC, however. By official count,
seventy-seven came in the first half of 1950 and seventy-five during the
latter half. The actual count could have been more because in 1950, UFO
reports were about as popular as sand in spinach, and I would guess that at
least a few wound up in the "circular file."

In early January 1951 I was recalled to active duty and assigned to Air
Technical Intelligence Center as an intelligence officer. I had been at ATIC
only eight and a half hours when I first heard the words "flying saucer"
officially used. I had never paid a great deal of attention to flying saucer
reports but I had read a few—especially those that had been made by pilots.
I'd managed to collect some 2,000 hours of flying time and had seen many
odd things in the air, but I'd always been able to figure out what they were
in a few seconds. I was convinced that if a pilot, or any crew member of an
airplane, said that he'd seen something that he couldn't identify he meant it
—it wasn't a hallucination. But I wasn't convinced that flying saucers were
spaceships.

My interest in UFO's picked up in a hurry when I learned that ATIC was
the government agency that was responsible for the UFO project. And I was
really impressed when I found out that the person who sat three desks down

and one over from mine was in charge of the whole UFO show. So when I
came to work on my second morning at ATIC and heard the words "flying
saucer report" being talked about and saw a group of people standing
around the chief of the UFO project's desk I about sprung an eardrum
listening to what they had to say. It seemed to be a big deal—except that
most of them were laughing. It must be a report of hoax or hallucination, I
remember thinking to myself, but I listened as one of the group told the
others about the report.

The night before a Mid-Continent Airlines DC-3 was taxiing out to take
off from the airport at Sioux City, Iowa, when the airport control tower
operators noticed a bright bluish-white light in the west. The tower
operators, thinking that it was another airplane, called the pilot of the DC-3
and told him to be careful since there was another airplane approaching the
field. As the DC-3 lined up to take off, both the pilots of the airliner and the
tower operators saw the light moving in, but since it was still some distance
away the DC- 3 was given permission to take off. As it rolled down the
runway getting up speed, both the pilot and the copilot were busy, so they
didn't see the light approaching. But the tower operators did, and as soon as
the DC-3 was airborne, they called and told the pilot to be careful. The
copilot said that he saw the light and was watching it. Just then the tower
got a call from another airplane that was requesting landing instructions and
the operators looked away from the light.

In the DC-3 the pilot and copilot had also looked away from the light for
a few seconds. When they looked back, the bluish-white light had
apparently closed in because it was much brighter and it was dead ahead. In
a split second it closed in and flashed by their right wing—so close that
both pilots thought that they would collide with it. When it passed the DC-
3, the pilots saw more than a light— they saw a huge object that looked like
the "fuselage of a B-29."

When the copilot had recovered he looked out his side window to see if
he could see the UFO and there it was, flying formation with them. He
yelled at the pilot, who leaned over and looked just in time to see the UFO
disappear.

The second look confirmed the Mid-Continent crew's first impression—
the object looked like a B-29 without wings. They saw nothing more, only a
big "shadowy shape" and the bluish-white light—no windows, no exhaust.

The tower had missed the incident because they were landing the other
airplane and the pilot and the copilot didn't have time to call them and tell
them about what was going on. All the tower operators could say was that
seconds after the UFO had disappeared the light that they had seen was
gone.

When the airliner landed in Omaha, the crew filed a report that was
forwarded to the Air Force. But this wasn't the only report that was filed; a
full colonel from military intelligence had been a passenger on the DC-3.
He'd seen the UFO too, and he was mighty impressed.

I thought that this was an interesting report and I wondered what the
official reaction would be. The official reaction was a great big, deep belly
laugh.

This puzzled me because I'd read that the Air Force was seriously
investigating all UFO reports.

I continued to eavesdrop on the discussions about the report all day since
the UFO expert was about to "investigate" the incident. He sent out a wire
to Flight Service and found that there was a B-36 somewhere in the area of
Sioux City at the time of the sighting, and from what I could gather he was
trying to blame the sighting on the B- 36. When Washington called to get

the results of the analysis of the sighting, they must have gotten the B-36
treatment because the case was closed.

I'd only been at ATIC two days and I certainly didn't class myself
as an intelligence expert, but it didn't take an expert to see that a
B-36, even one piloted by an experienced idiot, could not do what the
UFO had done—buzz a DC-3 that was in an airport traffic pattern.

I didn't know it at the time but a similar event had occurred the year
before. On the night of May 29, 1950, the crew of an American Airlines
DC-6 had just taken off from Washington National Airport, and they were
about seven miles west of Mount Vernon when the copilot suddenly looked
out and yelled, "Watch it—watch it." The pilot and the engineer looked out
to see a bluish-white light closing in on them from dead ahead. The pilot
racked the DC-6 up in a tight right turn while the UFO passed by on the left
"from eleven to seven o'clock" and a little higher than the airliner. During
this time the UFO passed between the full moon and DC-6 and the crew
could see the dark silhouette of a "wingless B-29." Its length was about half
the diameter of the full moon, and it had a blue flame shooting out the tail
end.

Seconds after the UFO had passed by the DC-6, the copilot looked out
and there it was again, apparently flying formation off their right wing.
Then in a flash of blue flame it was gone—streaking out ahead of the
airliner and making a left turn toward the coast.

The pilot of the DC-6, who made the report, had better than 15,000 hours'
flying time.

I didn't hear anything about UFO's, or flying saucers, as they were then
known, for several weeks but I kept them in mind and one day I asked one
of the old hands at ATIC about them—specifically I wanted to know about

the Sioux City Incident. Why had it been sloughed off so lightly? His
answer was typical of the official policy at that time. "One of these days all
of these crazy pilots will kill themselves, the crazy people on the ground
will be locked up, and there won't be any more flying saucer reports."

But after I knew the people at ATIC a little better, I found that being anti-
saucer wasn't a unanimous feeling. Some of the intelligence officers took
the UFO reports seriously. One man, who had been on Project Sign since it
was organized back in 1947, was convinced that the UFO's were
interplanetary spaceships. He had questioned the people in the control tower
at Godman AFB when Captain Mantell was killed chasing the UFO, and he
had spent hours talking to the crew of the DC-3 that was buzzed near
Montgomery, Alabama, by a "cigar-shaped UFO that spouted blue flame."
In essence, he knew UFO history from A to Z because he had "been there."

I think that it was this controversial thinking that first aroused my interest
in the subject of UFO's and led me to try to sound out a few more people.

The one thing that stood out to me, being unindoctrinated in the ways of
UFO lore, was the schizophrenic approach so many people at ATIC took.
On the surface they sided with the belly-laughers on any saucer issue, but if
you were alone with them and started to ridicule the subject, they defended
it or at least took an active interest. I learned this one day after I'd been at
ATIC about a month.

A belated UFO report had come in from Africa. One of my friends was
reading it, so I asked him if I could take a look at it when he had finished.
In a few minutes he handed it to me.

When I finished with the report I tossed it back on my friend's desk, with
some comment about the whole world's being nuts. I got a reaction I didn't
expect; he wasn't so sure the whole world was nuts— maybe the nuts were

at ATIC. "What's the deal?" I asked him. "Have they really thoroughly
checked out every report and found that there's nothing to any of them?"

He told me that he didn't think so, he'd been at ATIC a long time. He
hadn't ever worked on the UFO project, but he had seen many of their
reports and knew what they were doing. He just plain didn't buy a lot of
their explanations. "And I'm not the only one who thinks this," he added.

"Then why all of the big show of power against the UFO reports?" I
remember asking him.

"The powers-that-be are anti-flying saucer," he answered about half
bitterly, "and to stay in favor it behooves one to follow suit."

As of February 1951 this was the UFO project.

The words "flying saucer" didn't come up again for a month or two. I'd
forgotten all about the two words and was deeply engrossed in making an
analysis of the performance of the Mig-15. The Mig had just begun to show
up in Korea, and finding out more about it was a hot project.

Then the words "flying saucer" drifted across the room once more.
But this time instead of belly laughter there was a note of hysteria.

It seems that a writer from Life magazine was doing some research on
UFO's and rumor had it that Life was thinking about doing a feature article.
The writer had gone to the Office of Public Information in the Pentagon and
had inquired about the current status of Project Grudge. To accommodate
the writer, the OPI had sent a wire out to ATIC: What is the status of Project
Grudge?

Back went a snappy reply: Everything is under control; each new report
is being thoroughly analyzed by our experts; our vast files of reports are in

tiptop shape; and in general things are hunky-dunky. All UFO reports are
hoaxes, hallucinations, and the misidentification of known objects.

Another wire from Washington: Fine, Mr. Bob Ginna of Life is leaving
for Dayton. He wants to check some reports.

Bedlam in the raw.

Other magazines had printed UFO stories, and other reporters had visited
ATIC, but they had always stayed in the offices of the top brass. For some
reason the name Life, the prospects of a feature story, and the feeling that
this Bob Ginna was going to ask questions caused sweat to flow at ATIC.

Ginna arrived and the ATIC UFO "expert" talked to him. Ginna later told
me about the meeting. He had a long list of questions about reports that had
been made over the past four years and every time he asked a question, the
"expert" would go tearing out of the room to try to find the file that had the
answer. I remember that day people spent a lot of time ripping open bundles
of files and pawing through them like a bunch of gophers. Many times, "I'm
sorry, that's classified," got ATIC out of a tight spot.

Ginna, I can assure you, was not at all impressed by the "efficiently
operating UFO project." People weren't buying the hoax, hallucination, and
misidentification stories quite as readily as the Air Force believed.

Where it started or who started it I don't know, but about two months
after the visit from Life's representative the official interest in UFO's began
to pick up. Lieutenant Jerry Cummings, who had recently been recalled to
active duty, took over the project.

Lieutenant Cummings is the type of person who when given a job to do
does it. In a few weeks the operation of the UFO project had improved

considerably. But the project was still operating under political, economic,
and manpower difficulties. Cummings' desk was right across from mine, so
I began to get a UFO indoctrination via bull sessions. Whenever Jerry found
a good report in the pile—and all he had to start with was a pile of papers
and files—he'd toss it over for me to read.

Some of the reports were unimpressive, I remember. But a few were just
the opposite. Two that I remember Jerry's showing me made me wonder
how the UFO's could be sloughed off so lightly. The two reports involved
movies taken by Air Force technicians at White Sands Proving Ground in
New Mexico.

The guided missile test range at White Sands is fully instrumented to
track high, fast-moving objects—the guided missiles. Located over an area
of many square miles there are camera stations equipped with
cinetheodolite cameras and linked together by a telephone system.

On April 27, 1950, a guided missile had been fired, and as it roared up
into the stratosphere and fell back to earth, the camera crews had recorded
its flight. All the crews had started to unload their cameras when one of
them spotted an object streaking across the sky. By April 1950 every person
at White Sands was UFO-conscious, so one member of the camera crew
grabbed a telephone headset, alerted the other crews, and told them to get
pictures. Unfortunately only one camera had film in it, the rest had already
been unloaded, and before they could reload, the UFO was gone. The
photos from the one station showed only a smudgy dark object. About all
the film proved was that something was in the air and whatever it was, it
was moving.

Alerted by this first chance to get a UFO to "run a measured course," the
camera crews agreed to keep a sharper lookout. They also got the official
O.K. to "shoot" a UFO if one appeared.

Almost exactly a month later another UFO did appear, or at least at the
time the camera crews thought that it was a UFO. This time the crews were
ready—when the call went out over the telephone net that a UFO had been
spotted, all of the crews scanned the sky. Two of the crews saw it and shot
several feet of film as the shiny, bright object streaked across the sky.

As soon as the missile tests were completed, the camera crews rushed
their film to the processing lab and then took it to the Data Reduction
Group. But once again the UFO had eluded man because there were
apparently two or more UFO's in the sky and each camera station had
photographed a separate one. The data were no good for triangulation.

The records at ATIC didn't contain the analysis of these films but they did
mention the Data Reduction Group at White Sands. So when I later took
over the UFO investigation I made several calls in an effort to run down the
actual film and the analysis. The files at White Sands, like all files,
evidently weren't very good, because the original reports were gone. I did
contact a major who was very co- operative and offered to try to find the
people who had worked on the analysis of the film. His report, after talking
to two men who had done the analysis, was what I'd expected—nothing
concrete except that the UFO's were unknowns. He did say that by putting a
correction factor in the data gathered by the two cameras they were able to
arrive at a rough estimate of speed, altitude, and size. The UFO was "higher
than 40,000 feet, traveling over 2,000 miles per hour, and it was over 300
feet in diameter." He cautioned me, however, that these figures were only
estimates, based on the possibly erroneous correction factor; therefore they
weren't proof of anything—except that something was in the air.

The people at White Sands continued to be on the alert for UFO's while
the camera stations were in operation because they realized that if the flight

path of a UFO could be accurately plotted and timed it could be positively
identified. But no more UFO's showed up.

One day Lieutenant Cummings came over to my desk and dropped a
stack of reports in front of me. "All radar reports," he said, "and I'm getting
more and more of them every day."

Radar reports, I knew, had always been a controversial point in UFO
history, and if more and more radar reports were coming in, there was no
doubt that an already controversial issue was going to be compounded.

To understand why there is always some disagreement whenever a flying
saucer is picked up on radar, it is necessary to know a little bit about how
radar operates.

Basically radar is nothing but a piece of electronic equipment that
"shouts" out a radio wave and "listens" for the echo. By "knowing" how fast
the radio, or radar, wave travels and from which direction the echo is
coming, the radar tells the direction and distance of the object that is
causing the echo. Any "solid" object like an airplane, bird, ship, or even a
moisture-laden cloud can cause a radar echo. When the echo comes back to
the radar set, the radar operator doesn't have to listen for it and time it
because this is all done for him by the radar set and he sees the "answer" on
his radarscope—a kind of a round TV screen. What the radar operator sees
is a bright dot, called a "blip" or a "return." The location of the return on the
scope tells him the location of the object that was causing the echo. As the
object moves through the sky, the radar operator sees a series of bright dots
on his scope that make a track. On some radar sets the altitude of the target,
the object causing the echo, can also be measured.

Under normal conditions the path that the radar waves take as they travel
through the air is known. Normal conditions are when the temperature and

relative humidity of the air decrease with an increase in altitude. But
sometimes a condition will occur where at some level, instead of the
temperature and/or relative humidity decreasing with altitude, it will begin
to increase. This layer of warm, moist air is known as an inversion layer,
and it can do all kinds of crazy things to a radar wave. It can cause part of
the radar wave to travel in a big arc and actually pick up the ground many
miles away. Or it can cause the wave to bend down just enough to pick up
trucks, cars, houses, or anything that has a surface perpendicular to the
ground level.

One would immediately think that since the ground or a house isn't
moving, and a car or truck is moving only 40, 50, or 60 miles an hour, a
radar operator should be able to pick these objects out from a fast-moving
target. But it isn't as simple as that. The inversion layer shimmers and
moves, and one second the radar may be picking up the ground or a truck in
one spot and the next second it may be picking up something in a different
spot. This causes a series of returns on the scope and can give the illusion of
extremely fast or slow speeds.

These are but a few of the effects of an inversion layer on radar. Some of
the effects are well known, but others aren't. The 3rd Weather Group at Air
Defense Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs has done a lot of
work on the effects of weather on radar, and they have developed
mathematical formulas for telling how favorable weather conditions are for
"anomalous propagation," the two-bit words for false radar targets caused
by weather.

The first problem in analyzing reports of UFO's being picked up on radar
is to determine if the weather conditions are right to give anomalous
propagation. This can be determined by putting weather data into a formula.
If they are, then it is necessary to determine whether the radar targets were

real or caused by the weather. This is the difficult job. In most cases the
only answer is the appearance of the target on the radar-scope. Many times
a weather target will be a fuzzy and indistinct spot on the scope while a real
target, an airplane for example, will be bright and sharp. This question of
whether a target looked real is the cause of the majority of the arguments
about radar-detected UFO's because it is up to the judgment of the radar
operator as to what the target looked like. And whenever human judgment
is involved in a decision, there is plenty of room for an argument.

All during the early summer of 1951 Lieutenant Cummings "fought the
syndicate" trying to make the UFO respectable. All the time I was
continuing to get my indoctrination. Then one day with the speed of a
shotgun wedding, the long-overdue respectability arrived. The date was
September 12, 1951, and the exact time was 3:04P.M.

On this date and time a teletype machine at Wright-Patterson AFB began
to chatter out a message. Thirty-six inches of paper rolled out of the
machine before the operator ripped off the copy, stamped it Operational
Immediate, and gave it to a special messenger to deliver to ATIC.
Lieutenant Cummings got the message. The report was from the Army
Signal Corps radar center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and it was red-
hot.

The incident had started two days before, on September 10, at
11:10A.M., when a student operator was giving a demonstration to a group
of visiting brass at the radar school. He demonstrated the set under manual
operation for a while, picking up local air traffic, then he announced that he
would demonstrate automatic tracking, in which the set is put on a target
and follows it without help from the operator. The set could track objects
flying at jet speeds.

The operator spotted an object about 12,000 yards southeast of the
station, flying low toward the north. He tried to switch the set to automatic
tracking. He failed, tried again, failed again. He turned to his audience of
VIPs, embarrassed.

"It's going too fast for the set," he said. "That means it's going faster than
a jet!"

A lot of very important eyebrows lifted. What flies faster than a jet?

The object was in range for three minutes and the operator kept trying,
without success, to get into automatic track. The target finally went off the
scope, leaving the red-faced operator talking to himself. The radar
technicians at Fort Monmouth had checked the weather—there wasn't the
slightest indication of an inversion layer.

Twenty-five minutes later the pilot of a T-33 jet trainer, carrying an Air
Force major as passenger and flying 20,000 feet over Point Pleasant, New
Jersey, spotted a dull silver, disklike object far below him. He described it
as 30 to 50 feet in diameter and as descending toward Sandy Hook from an
altitude of a mile or so. He banked the T-33 over and started down after it.
As he shot down, he reported, the object stopped its descent, hovered, then
sped south, made a 120-degree turn, and vanished out to sea.

The Fort Monmouth Incident then switched back to the radar group. At
3:15P.M. they got an excited, almost frantic call from headquarters to pick
up a target high and to the north—which was where the first "faster-than-a-
jet" object had vanished—and to pick it up in a hurry. They got a fix on it
and reported that it was traveling slowly at 93,000 feet. They also could see
it visually as a silver speck.

What flies 18 miles above the earth?

The next morning two radar sets picked up another target that couldn't be
tracked automatically. It would climb, level off, climb again, go into a dive.
When it climbed it went almost straight up.

The two-day sensation ended that afternoon when the radar tracked
another unidentified slow-moving object and tracked it for several minutes.

A copy of the message had also gone to Washington. Before Jerry could
digest the thirty-six inches of facts, ATIC's new chief, Colonel Frank Dunn,
got a phone call. It came from the office of the Director of Intelligence of
the Air Force, Major General (now Lieutenant General) C. P. Cabell.
General Cabell wanted somebody from ATIC to get to New Jersey—fast—
and find out what was going on. As soon as the reports had been thoroughly
investigated, the general said that he wanted a complete personal report.
Nothing expedites like a telephone call from a general officer, so in a matter
of hours Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel N. R. Rosengarten
were on an airliner, New Jersey-bound.

The two officers worked around the clock interrogating the radar
operators, their instructors, and the technicians at Fort Monmouth. The pilot
who had chased the UFO in the T-33 trainer and his passenger were flown
to New York, and they talked to Cummings and Rosengarten. All other
radar stations in the area were checked, but their radars hadn't picked up
anything unusual.

At about 4:00A.M. the second morning after they had arrived, the
investigation was completed, Cummings later told. He and Lieutenant
Colonel Rosengarten couldn't get an airliner out of New York in time to get
them to the Pentagon by 10:00A.M., the time that had been set up for their
report, so they chartered an airplane and flew to the capital to brief the
general.

General Cabell presided over the meeting, and it was attended by his
entire staff plus Lieutenant Cummings, Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten,
and a special representative from Republic Aircraft Corporation. The man
from Republic supposedly represented a group of top U.S. industrialists and
scientists who thought that there should be a lot more sensible answers
coming from the Air Force regarding the UFO's. The man was at the
meeting at the personal request of a general officer.

Every word of the two-hour meeting was recorded on a wire recorder.
The recording was so hot that it was later destroyed, but not before I had
heard it several times. I can't tell everything that was said but, to be
conservative, it didn't exactly follow the tone of the official Air Force
releases—many of the people present at the meeting weren't as convinced
that the "hoax, hallucination, and misidentification" answer was

The first thing the general wanted to know was, "Who in hell has been
giving me these reports that every decent flying saucer sighting is being
investigated?"

Then others picked up the questioning.

"What happened to those two reports that General ——— sent in from
Saudi Arabia? He saw those two flying saucers himself."

"And who released this big report, anyway?" another person added,
picking up a copy of the Grudge Report and slamming it back down on the
table.

Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten came back to
ATIC with orders to set up a new project and report back to General Cabell
when it was ready to go. But Cummings didn't get a chance to do much
work on the new revitalized Project Grudge—it was to keep the old name—

because in a few days he was a civilian. He'd been released from active duty
because he was needed back at Cal Tech, where he'd been working on an
important government project before his recall to active duty.

The day after Cummings got his separation orders, Lieutenant Colonel
Rosengarten called me into his office. The colonel was chief of the Aircraft
and Missiles branch and one of his many responsibilities was Project
Grudge. He said that he knew that I was busy as group leader of my regular
group but, if he gave me enough people, could I take Project Grudge? All
he wanted me to do was to get it straightened out and operating; then I
could go back to trying to outguess the Russians. He threw in a few
comments about the good job I'd done straightening out other fouled-up
projects. Good old "Rosy." With my ego sufficiently inflated, I said yes.

On many later occasions, when I'd land at home in Dayton just long
enough for a clean clothes resupply, or when the telephone would ring at
2:00A.M. to report a new "hot" sighting and wake up the baby, Mrs.
Ruppelt and I have soundly cussed my ego.

I had had the project only a few days when a minor flurry of good UFO
reports started. It wasn't supposed to happen because the day after I'd taken
over Project Grudge I'd met the ex-UFO "expert" in the hall and he'd nearly
doubled up with laughter as he said something about getting stuck with
Project Grudge. He predicted that I wouldn't get a report until the
newspapers began to play up flying saucers again. "It's all mass hysteria,"
he said.

The first hysterical report of the flurry came from the Air Defense
Command. On September 23, 1951, at seven fifty-five in the morning, two
F-86's on an early patrol were approaching Long Beach, California, coming
in on the west leg of the Long Beach Radio range. All of a sudden the flight
leader called his ground controller—high at twelve o'clock he and his wing

man saw an object. It was in a gradual turn to its left, and it wasn't another
airplane. The ground controller checked his radars but they had nothing, so
the ground controller called the leader of the F-86's back and told him to go
after the object and try to identify it. The two airplanes started to climb.

By this time the UFO had crossed over them but it was still in a turn and
was coming back. Several times they tried to intercept, but they could never
climb up to it. Once in a while, when they'd appear to be getting close, the
UFO would lazily move out of range by climbing slightly. All the time it
kept orbiting to the left in a big, wide circle. After about ten minutes the
flight leader told the ground controller, who had been getting a running
account of the unsuccessful intercept, that their fuel was low and that they'd
have to break off soon. They'd gotten a fairly good look at the UFO, the
flight leader told the ground controller, and it appeared to be a silver
airplane with highly swept-back wings. The controller acknowledged the
message and said that he was scrambling all his alert airplanes from George
AFB. Could the two F-86's stay in the area a few more minutes? They
stayed and in a few minutes four more F- 86's arrived. They saw the UFO
immediately and took over.

The two F-86's with nearly dry tanks went back to George AFB.

For thirty more minutes the newly arrived F-86's worked in pairs trying
to get up to the UFO's altitude, which they estimated to be 55,000 feet, but
they couldn't make it. All the time the UFO kept slowly circling and
speeding up only when the F-86's seemed to get too close. Then they began
to run out of fuel and asked for permission to break off the intercept.

By this time one remaining F-86 had been alerted and was airborne
toward Long Beach. He passed the four homeward-bound F-86's as he was
going in, but by the time he arrived over Long Beach the UFO was gone.

All the pilots except one reported a "silver airplane with highly swept-
back wings." One pilot said the UFO looked round and silver to him.

The report ended with a comment by the local intelligence officer. He'd
called Edwards AFB, the big Air Force test base north of Los Angeles, but
they had nothing in the air. The officer concluded that the UFO was no
airplane. In 1951 nothing we had would fly higher than the F-86.

This was a good report and I decided to dig in. First I had some more
questions I wanted to ask the pilots. I was just in the process of formulating
this set of questions when three better reports came in. They automatically
got a higher priority than the Long Beach Incident.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Lubbock Lights, Unabridged

When four college professors, a geologist, a chemist, a physicist, and a
petroleum engineer, report seeing the same UFO's on fourteen different
occasions, the event can be classified as, at least, unusual. Add the facts that
hundreds of other people saw these UFO's and that they were photographed,
and the story gets even better. Add a few more facts—that these UFO's were
picked up on radar and that a few people got a close look at one of them,
and the story begins to convince even the most ardent skeptics.

This was the situation the day the reports of the Lubbock Lights arrived
at ATIC. Actually the Lubbock Lights, as Project Blue Book calls them,
involved many widespread reports. Some of these incidents are known to
the public, but the ones that added the emphasis and intrigue to the case and
caused hundreds of hours of time to be spent analyzing the reports have not

been told before. We collected all of these reports under the one title
because there appeared to be a tie- in between them.

The first word of the sightings reached ATIC late in September 1951,
when the mail girl dropped letters into my "in" basket. One of the letters
was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, one was from a small town in
Washington State, where I knew an Air Defense Command radar station
was located, and the other from Reese AFB at Lubbock, Texas.

I opened the Albuquerque letter first. It was a report from 34th Air
Defense at Kirtland AFB. The report said that on the evening of August 25,
1951, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission's supersecret Sandia
Corporation and his wife had seen a UFO. About dusk they were sitting in
the back yard of their home on the outskirts of Albuquerque. They were
gazing at the night sky, commenting on how beautiful it was, when both of
them were startled at the sight of a huge airplane flying swiftly and silently
over their home. The airplane had been in sight only a few seconds but they
had gotten a good look at it because it was so low. They estimated 800 to
1,000 feet. It was the shape of a "flying wing" and one and a half times the
size of a B-36. The wing was sharply swept back, almost like a V. Both the
husband and wife had seen B-36's over their home many times. They
couldn't see the color of the UFO but they did notice that there were dark
bands running across the wing from front to back. On the aft edge of the
wings there were six to eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights. The
aircraft had passed over their house from north to south.

The report went on to say that an investigation had been made
immediately. Since the object might have been a conventional airplane, air
traffic was checked. A commercial airlines Constellation was 50 miles west
of Albuquerque and an Air Force B-25 was south of the city, but there had
been nothing over Albuquerque that evening. The man's background was

checked. He had a "Q" security clearance. This summed up his character,
oddballs don't get "Q" clearances. No one else had reported the UFO, but
this could be explained by the fact the AEC employee and his wife lived in
such a location that anything passing over their home from north to south
wouldn't pass over or near very many other houses. A sketch of the UFO
was enclosed in the report.

I picked up the letter from Lubbock next. It was a thick report, and from
the photographs that were attached, it looked interesting. I thumbed through
it and stopped at the photos. The first thing that struck me was the similarity
between these photos and the report I'd just read. They showed a series of
lights in a V shape, very similar to those described as being on the aft edge
of the "flying wing" that was reported from Albuquerque. This was
something unique, so I read the report in detail.

On the night of August 25, 1951, about 9:20P.M., just twenty minutes
after the Albuquerque sighting, four college professors from Texas
Technological College at Lubbock had observed a formation of soft,
glowing, bluish-green lights pass over their home. Several hours later they
saw a similar group of lights and in the next two weeks they saw at least ten
more. On August 31 an amateur photographer had taken five photos of the
lights. Also on the thirty-first two ladies had seen a large "aluminum-
colored," "pear-shaped" object hovering near a road north of Lubbock. The
report went into the details of these sightings and enclosed a set of the
photos that had been taken.

This report, in itself, was a good UFO report, but the similarity to the
Albuquerque sighting, both in the description of the object and the time that
it was seen, was truly amazing.

I almost overlooked the report from the radar station because it was fairly
short. It said that early on the morning of August 26, only a few hours after

the Lubbock sighting, two different radars had shown a target traveling 900
miles per hour at 13,000 feet on a northwesterly heading. The target had
been observed for six minutes and an F-86 jet interceptor had been
scrambled but by the time the F- 86 had climbed into the air the target was
gone. The last paragraph in the report was rather curt and to the point. It
was apparently in anticipation of the comments the report would draw. It
said that the target was not caused by weather. The officer in charge of the
radar station and several members of his crew had been operating radar for
seven years and they could recognize a weather target. This target was real.

I quickly took out a map of the United States and drew in a course line
between Lubbock and the radar station. A UFO flying between these two
points would be on a northwesterly heading and the times it was seen at the
two places gave it a speed of roughly 900 miles per hour.

This was by far the best combination of UFO reports I'd ever read and I'd
read every one in the Air Force's files.

The first thing I did after reading the reports was to rush a set of the
Lubbock photos to the intelligence officer of the 34th Air Division in
Albuquerque. I asked him to show the photos to the AEC employee and his
wife without telling them what they were. I requested an answer by wire.
Later the next day I received my answer: "Observers immediately said that
this is what they saw on the night of 25 August. Details by airmail." The
details were a sketch the man and his wife had made of a wing around the
photo of the Lubbock Lights. The number of lights in the photo and the
number of lights the two observers had seen on the wing didn't tally, but
they explained this by saying that they could have been wrong in their
estimate.

The next day I flew to Lubbock to see if I could find an answer to all of
these mysterious happenings.

I arrived in Lubbock about 5:00P.M. and contacted the intelligence
officer at Reese AFB. He knew that I was on my way and had already set up
a meeting with the four professors. Right after dinner we met them.

If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn't have
picked a more technically qualified group of people. They were:

Dr. W. I. Robinson, Professor of Geology.

Dr. A. G. Oberg, Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Professor W. L. Ducker, Head of the Petroleum Engineering Department.

Dr. George, Professor of Physics.

This is their story:

On the evening of August 25 the four men were sitting in Dr. Robinson's
back yard. They were discussing micrometeorites and drinking tea. They
jokingly stressed this point. At nine-twenty a formation of lights streaked
across the sky directly over their heads. It all happened so fast that none of
them had a chance to get a good look. One of the men mentioned that he
had always admonished his students for not being more observant; now he
was in that spot. He and his colleagues realized they could remember only a
few details of what they had seen. The lights were a weird bluish-green
color and they were in a semicircular formation. They estimated that there
were from fifteen to thirty separate lights and that they were moving from
north to south. Their one wish at this time was that the lights would
reappear. They did; about an hour later the lights went over again. This time
the professors were a little better prepared. With the initial shock worn off,
they had time to get a better look. The details they had remembered from

the first flight checked. There was one difference; in this flight the lights
were not in any orderly formation, they were just in a group.

The professors reasoned that if the UFO's appeared twice they might
come back. Come back they did. The next night and apparently many times
later, as the professors made twelve more observations during the next few
weeks. For these later sightings they added two more people to their
observing team.

Being methodical, as college professors are, they made every attempt to
get a good set of data. They measured the angle through which the objects
traveled and timed them. The several flights they checked traveled through
90 degrees of sky in three seconds, or 30 degrees per second. The lights
usually suddenly appeared 45 degrees above the northern horizon, and
abruptly went out 45 degrees above the southern horizon. They always
traveled in this north-to-south direction. Outside of the first flight, in which
the objects were in a roughly semicircular formation, in none of the rest of
the flights did they note any regular pattern. Two or three flights were often
seen in one night.

They had tried to measure the altitude, with no success. First they tried to
compare the lights to the height of clouds but the clouds were never near
the lights, or vice versa. Next they tried a more elaborate scheme. They
measured off a base line perpendicular to the objects' usual flight path.
Friends of the professors made up two teams. Each of the two teams was
equipped with elevation-measuring devices, and one team was stationed at
each end of the base line. The two teams were linked together by two-way
radios. If they sighted the objects they would track and time them, thus
getting the speed and altitude.

Unfortunately neither team ever saw the lights. But the lights never
seemed to want to run the course. The wives of some of the watchers

claimed to have seen them from their homes in the city. This later proved to
be a clue.

The professors were not the sole observers of the mysterious lights. For
two weeks hundreds of other people for miles around Lubbock reported that
they saw the same lights. The professors checked many of these reports
against the times of the flights they had seen and recorded, and many
checked out close. They attempted to question these observers as to the
length of time they had seen the lights and angles at which they had seen
them, but the professors learned what I already knew, people are poor
observers.

Naturally there has been much discussion among the professors and their
friends as to the nature of the lights. A few simple mathematical
calculations showed that if the lights were very high they would be
traveling very fast. The possibility that they were some natural phenomena
was, of course, discussed and seriously considered. The professors did a lot
of thinking and research and decided that if they were natural phenomena
they were something altogether new. Dr. George, who has since died,
studied the phenomena of the night sky during his years as a professor at
the University of Alaska, and he had never seen or heard of anything like
this before.

This was the professors' story. It was early in the morning when we
returned to Reese AFB. I sat up a few more hours unsuccessfully trying to
figure out what they had seen.

The next day I again met the intelligence officer and we went to talk to
Carl Hart, Jr., the amateur photographer who had taken the pictures of the
lights. Hart was a freshman at Texas Tech. His story was that on the night of
August 31 he was lying in his bed in an upstairs room of the Hart home. He,
like everyone else in Lubbock, had heard about the lights but he had never

seen them. It was a warm night and his bed was pushed over next to an
open window. He was looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in
bed about a half hour, when he saw a formation of the lights appear in the
north, cross an open patch of sky, and disappear over his house. Knowing
that the lights might reappear as they had done in the past, he grabbed his
loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and shutter at f 3.5 and one tenth of a second,
and went out into the middle of the back yard. Before long his vigil was
rewarded when the lights made a second pass. He got two pictures. A third
formation went over a few minutes later and he got three more pictures. The
next morning bright and early Hart said he took the roll of unexposed film
to a friend who ran a photo-finishing shop. He explained that he did all of
his film processing in this friend's lab. He told the friend about the pictures
and they quickly developed them.

I stopped Hart at this point and asked why he didn't get more excited
about what could be the biggest news photos of the century. He said that the
lights had appeared to be so dim that he was sure he didn't have anything on
the negatives; had he thought that he did have some good pictures he would
have awakened his friend to develop the negatives right away.

When he developed the negatives and saw that they showed an image, his
friend suggested that he call the newspaper. At first the paper wasn't
interested but then they decided to run the photos. I later found out that they
had done some checking of their own.

We went with Hart into his back yard to re-enact what had taken place.
He described the lights as being the same dull, glowing bluish- green color
as those seen by the professors. The formation was different, however. The
lights Hart saw were always flying in a perfect V. He traced the path from
where they appeared over some trees in the north, through an open patch of
sky over the back yard, to a point where they disappeared over the house.

From the flight path he pointed out, the lights had crossed about 120
degrees of open sky in four seconds. This 30-degree-per-second angular
velocity corresponded to the professors' measured angular velocity.

We made arrangements to borrow Hart's negatives, thanked him for his
information, and left.

Armed with a list of names of other observers of the mysterious lights,
the intelligence officer and I started out to try to get a cross-section account
of the other UFO sightings in the Lubbock area. All the stories about the
UFO's were the same; various types of formations of dull bluish-green
lights, generally moving north to south. A few people had variations. One
lady saw a flying Venetian blind and another a flying double boiler. One
point of interest was that very few claimed to have seen the lights before
reading the professors' story in the paper, but this could get back to the old
question, "Do people look up if they have no reason to do so?"

We talked to observers in nearby towns. Their stories were the same. Two
of them, tower operators at an airport, reported that they had seen the lights
on several occasions.

It was in one of these outlying towns, Lamesa, that we talked to an old
gentleman, about eighty years old, who gave us a good lead. He had seen
the lights and he had identified them. Ever since he had read the story in the
papers he had been looking. One evening he and his wife were in their yard
looking for the lights. All of a sudden two or three appeared. They were in
view for several seconds, then they were gone. In a few minutes the lights
did a repeat performance. The man admitted he had been scared. He broke
off his story of the lights and launched into his background as a native
Texan, with range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches under his belt. What he
was trying to point out was that despite the range wars, Indians, and
stagecoaches, he had been scared. His wife had been scared too. We had

some difficulty getting back to the lights but we finally made it. The third
time they came around, he said, one of the lights emitted a sound. It said,
"Plover." The old gentleman had immediately identified it as a plover, a
water bird about the size of a quail. Later that night, and on several other
occasions, they had seen the same thing. After a few more hair-raising but
interesting stories of the old west Texas, we left.

Our next stop was the federal game warden's office in Lubbock. We got
the low-down on plovers. We explained our interest and the warden was
very helpful. He had been around west Texas all of his life so he was
familiar with wildlife. The oily white breast of a plover could easily reflect
light, but plovers usually didn't travel in more than pairs, or three at the
most. He had never seen or heard of them traveling in a flock of fifteen to
thirty but, of course, this wasn't impossible. Ducks, yes, but probably not
plovers. He did say that for some unknown reason there were more than the
usual number of plovers in the area that fall.

I was anxious to get the negatives that Hart had lent us back to the photo
lab at Wright Field, but I had one more call to make. I wanted to talk to the
two ladies who had seen a strange object hovering near their car, but I also
wanted to write my report before I left Lubbock. Two Air Force special
investigators from Reese AFB offered to talk to the ladies, so I stayed at the
air base and finished my report.

That night when the investigators came back, I got the story. They had
spent the whole day talking to the ladies and doing a little discreet checking
into their backgrounds.

The two ladies, a mother and her daughter, had left their home in
Matador, Texas, 70 miles northeast of Lubbock, about twelve-thirty P.M. on
August 31. They were driving along in their car when they suddenly noticed
"a pear-shaped" object about 150 yards ahead of them. It was just off the

side of the road, about 120 feet in the air. It was drifting slowly to the east,
"less than the speed required to take off in a Cub airplane." They drove on
down the road about 50 more yards, stopped, and got out of the car. The
object, which they estimated to be the size of a B-29 fuselage, was still
drifting along slowly. There was no sign of any exhaust blast and they heard
no noise, but they did see a "porthole" in the side of the object. In a few
seconds the object began to pick up speed and rapidly climb out of sight. As
it climbed it seemed to have a tight spiraling motion.

The investigation showed that the two ladies were "solid citizens," with
absolutely no talents, or reasons, for fabricating such a story. The daughter
was fairly familiar with aircraft. Her husband was an Air Force officer then
in Korea, and she had been living near air bases for several years. The
ladies had said that the object was "drifting" to the east, which possibly
indicated that it was moving with the wind, but on further investigation it
was found that it was moving into the wind.

The two investigators had worked all day and hadn't come up with the
slightest indication of an answer.

This added the final section to my now voluminous report on the
Lubbock affair.

The next morning as I rode to the airport to catch an airliner back to
Dayton I tried to put the whole puzzle together. It was hard to believe that
all Fd heard was real. Did a huge flying wing pass over Albuquerque and
travel 250 miles to Lubbock in about fifteen minutes? This would be about
900 miles per hour. Did the radar station in Washington pick up the same
thing? I'd checked the distances on the big wall map in flight operations just
before leaving Reese AFB. It was 1,300 miles from Lubbock to the radar
site. From talking to people, we decided that the lights were apparently still
around Lubbock at 11:20P.M. and the radar picked them up just after

midnight. They would have had to be traveling about 780 miles per hour.
This was fairly close to the 900-mile-per-hour speed clocked by the two
radars. The photos of the Lubbock Lights checked with the description of
what the AEC employee and his wife had seen in Albuquerque. Nobody in
Lubbock, however, had reported seeing a "flying wing" with lights. All of
this was swimming around in my mind when I stepped out of the staff car at
the Lubbock airport.

My plane had already landed so I checked in at the ticket counter, picked
up a morning paper, and ran out and got into the airplane. I sat down next to
a man wearing a Stetson hat and cowboy boots. I soon found out he was a
retired rancher from Lubbock.

On the front page of the paper was an account of a large meteor that had
flashed across New Mexico, west Texas, and Oklahoma the night before.
According to the newspaper account, it was very spectacular and had
startled a good many people in Lubbock. I was interested in the story
because I had seen this meteor. It was a spectacular sight and I could easily
understand how such things could be called UFO's. My seat partner must
have noticed that I was reading the story of the meteor because he
commented that a friend of his, the man who had brought him to the airport,
had seen it. We talked about the meteor. This led to a discussion of other
odd happenings and left a perfect opening for him to bring up the Lubbock
Lights. He asked me if I'd heard about them. I said that I had heard a few
vague stories. I hoped that this would stave off any detailed accounts of
stories I had been saturated with during the past five days, but it didn't. I
heard all the details all over again.

As he talked on, I settled back in my seat waiting for a certain thing to
happen. Pretty soon it came. The rancher hesitated and the tone of his voice
changed to a half-proud, half-apologetic tone. I'd heard this transition many

times in the past few months; he was going to tell about the UFO that he
had seen. He was going to tell how he had seen the bluish-green lights. I
was wrong; what he said knocked me out of my boredom.

The same night that the college professors had seen their formation of
lights his wife had seen something. Nobody in Lubbock knew about the
story, not even their friends. He didn't want anyone to think he and his wife
were "crazy." He was telling me only because I was a stranger. Just after
dark his wife had gone outdoors to take some sheets off the clothesline. He
was inside the house reading the paper. Suddenly his wife had rushed into
the house, as he told the story, "as white as the sheets she was carrying." As
close as he could remember, he said, this was about ten minutes before the
professors made their first sighting. He stopped at this point to tell me about
his wife, she wasn't prone to be "flighty" and she "never made up tales."
This character qualification was also standard for UFO storytellers. The
reason his wife was so upset was that she had seen a large object glide
swiftly and silently over the house. She said it looked like "an airplane
without a body." On the back edge of the wing were pairs of glowing bluish
lights. The Albuquerque sighting! He said he didn't have any idea what his
wife had seen but he thought that it was an interesting story.

It was an interesting story. It hit me right between the eyes. I knew the
rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's
story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of
two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since
neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered
how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or anywhere in the
Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and hesitated to
mention it.

I tried to get a few more facts from the rancher but he'd told me all he
knew. At Dallas I boarded an airliner to Dayton and he went on to Baton
Rouge, never knowing what he'd added to the story of the Lubbock Lights.

On the way to Dayton I figured out a plan of attack on the thousands of
words of notes I'd taken. The best thing to do, I decided, was to treat each
sighting in the Lubbock Light series as a separate incident. All of them
seemed to be dependent upon each other for importance. If the objects that
were reported in several of the incidents could be identified, the rest would
merely become average UFO reports. The photographs taken by Carl Hart,
Jr., became number one on the agenda.

As soon as I reached Dayton I took Hart's negatives to the Photo
Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field. This laboratory, staffed by the
Air Force's top photography experts, did all of our analysis of photographs.
They went right to work on the negatives and soon had a report.

There had originally been five negatives, but when we asked to borrow
them Hart could only produce four. The negatives were badly scratched and
dirty because so many people had handled them, so it was difficult to tell
the actual photographic images from the dust spots and scratches. The first
thing that the lab did was to look at each spot on the negatives to see if it
was an actual photographic image. They found that the photos showed an
inverted V formation of lights. In each photo the individual image of a light
was badly blurred due to motion of the camera, but by careful scrutiny of
each blurred image they were able to determine that the original lights that
Hart had photographed were circular, near pinpoint sources of light. Like a
bright star, or a distant light bulb. Next they made enlargements from the
negatives and carefully plotted the position of each light in the formation.

In each photograph the individual lights in the formation shifted position
according to a definite pattern.

One additional factor that was brought out in the report was that although
the photos were taken on a clear night no images of the stars could be found
in the background. This proved one thing, the lights, which were
overexposed in the photograph, were a great deal brighter than the stars, or
the lights affected the film more than the light from the stars.

This was all that the photos showed. It was impossible to determine the
size of each image of the group, speed, or altitude.

The next thing was to try to duplicate what Hart said he had done. I
enlisted the aid of several friends and we tried to photograph a moving
light. When we were talking to Hart in Lubbock, he had taken us to his back
yard, where he had shot the pictures. He had traced the flight path of fights
across the sky. We had him estimate the speed by following an imaginary
flight of lights across the sky. It came out to about four seconds. We had a
camera identical to the one that Hart had used and set up a light to move at
the same speed as the UFO's had flown. We tried to take photographs. In
four seconds we could get only two poor shots. These were badly blurred,
much worse than Hart's, due to the one-tenth-of-a-second shutter speed. We
repeated our experiment several times, each time with the same results. This
made a lot of people doubt the authenticity of Hart's photos.

With the completed photo lab report in my hands, I was still without an
answer. The report was interesting but didn't prove anything. All I could do
was to get opinions from as qualified sources as I could find. A physiologist
at the Aeromedical Laboratory knocked out the timing theory immediately
by saying that if Hart had been excited he could have easily taken three
photos in four seconds if we could get two in four seconds in our
experiment. Several professional photographers, one of them a top Life
photographer, said that if Hart was familiar with his camera and was
familiar with panning action shots, his photos would have shown much less

blur than ours. I recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed
sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for a
good panning technique.

The photographs didn't tally with the description of the lights that the
professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that they were of
"home manufacture." The professors had reported soft, glowing lights yet
the photos showed what should have been extremely bright lights. Hart
reported a perfect formation while the professors, except for the first flight,
reported an unorderly group. There was no way to explain this disagreement
in the arrangement of the lights. Of course, it wasn't impossible that on the
night that Hart saw the lights they were flying in a V formation. The first
time the professors saw them they were flying in a semicircle.

The intensity of the lights was difficult to explain. Again I went to the
people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory. I asked them if there was
any possible situation that could cause this. They said yes. An intensely
bright light source which had a color far over in the red end of the
spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it. The eye is not sensitive to such
a light, it could appear dim to the eye yet be "bright" to the film. I asked
them what kind of a light source would cause this. There were several
things, if you want to speculate, they said, extremely high temperatures for
one. But this was as far as they would go. We have nothing in this world
that flies that appears dim to the eye yet will show bright on film, they said.

This ended the investigation of the photographs, and the investigation
ended at a blank wall. My official conclusion, which was later given to the
press, was that "The photos were never proven to be a hoax but neither
were they proven to be genuine." There is no definite answer.

The emphasis of the investigation was now switched to the professors'
sighting. The meager amount of data that they had gathered seemed to be

accurate but it was inconclusive as far as getting a definite answer was
concerned. They had measured two things, how much of the sky the objects
had crossed in a certain time and the angle from one side of the formation to
the other. These figures didn't mean a great deal, however, since the altitude
at which the formation of lights was flying was unknown. If you assumed
that the objects were flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could easily
compute that they were traveling about 3,600 miles per hour, or five to six
times the speed of sound. The formation would have been about 1,750 feet
wide. If each light was a separate object it could have been in the
neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter. These figures were only a guess since
nobody knew if the lights were at, above, or below 10,000 feet. If they had
been higher they would have been going faster and have been larger. If
lower than 10,000 feet, slower and smaller.

The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB intelligence
officer and I were investigating the professors' sightings was that the UFO's
were birds reflecting the city lights; specifically plover. The old cowboy
from Lamesa had described something identical to what the professors
described and they were plover. Secondly, whenever the professors left the
vicinity of their homes to look for the lights they didn't see them, yet their
wives, who stayed at home, did see them. If the "lights" were birds they
would be flying low and couldn't be seen from more than a few hundred
feet. While in Lubbock I'd noticed several main boulevards lighted with the
bluish mercury vapor lights. I called the intelligence officer at Reese AFB
and he airmailed me a city map of Lubbock with the mercury-vapor-lighted
streets marked. The place where the professors had made their observations
was close to one of these streets. The big hitch in this theory was that
people living miles from a mercury-vapor-lighted boulevard had also
reported the lights. How many of these sightings were due to the power of
suggestion and how many were authentic I didn't know. If I could have
found out, it would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and

if they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be an
answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.

The fact that the lights didn't make any perceivable sound seemed as if it
might be a clue. Birds or light phenomena wouldn't make any sound, but
how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or above the speed
of sound? Jet airplanes don't fly as fast as the speed of sound but they make
a horrible roar. Artillery shells, which are going much faster than aircraft,
whine as they go through the air. I knew that a great deal of the noise from a
jet is due to the heated air rushing out of the tail pipe, but I didn't know
exactly how much of the noise this caused. If a jet airplane with a silent
engine could be built, how much noise would it make? How far could it be
heard? To get the answer I contacted National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics Laboratory at Langley AFB, a government agency which
specializes in aeronautical research. They didn't know. Neither they nor
anybody else had ever done any research on this question. Their opinion
was that such an aircraft could not be heard 5,000 or 10,000 feet away.
Aerodynamicists at Wright Field's Aircraft Laboratory agreed.

I called the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen Proving
Grounds, Maryland, to find out why artillery shells whine. These people
develop and test all kinds of shells so they would have an answer if
anybody did. They said that the majority of the whine of an artillery shell is
probably caused by the flat back end of the shell. If a perfectly streamlined
shell could be used it would not have any perceivable whine.

What I found out, or didn't find out, about the sound of an object moving
at several times the speed of sound was typical of nearly every question that
came up regarding UFO's. We were working in a field where there were no
definite answers to questions. In some instances we were getting into fields
far advanced above the then present levels of research. In other instances

we were getting into fields where no research had been done at all. It made
the problem of UFO analysis one of getting opinions. All we could do was
hope the opinions we were getting were the best.

My attempts to reach a definite conclusion as to what the professors had
seen met another blank wall. I had no more success than I'd had trying to
reach a conclusion on the authenticity of the photographs.

A thorough analysis of the reports of the flying wings seen by the retired
rancher's wife in Lubbock and the AEC employee and his wife in
Albuquerque was made. The story from the two ladies who saw the
aluminum-colored pear-shaped object hovering near the road near Matador,
Texas, was studied, checked, and rechecked. Another blank wall on all three
of these sightings.

By the time I got around to working on the report from the radar station
in Washington State, the data of the weather conditions that existed on the
night of the sighting had arrived. I turned the incident folder over to the
electronics specialists at ATIC. They made the analysis and determined that
the targets were caused by weather, although it was a borderline case. They
further surmised that since the targets had been picked up on two radars, if I
checked I'd find out that the two targets looked different on the two
radarscopes. This is a characteristic of a weather target picked up on radars
operating on different frequencies. I did check. I called the radar station and
talked to the captain who was in charge of the crew the night the target had
been picked up.

The target looked the same on both scopes. This was one of the reasons it
had been reported, the captain told me. If the target hadn't been the same on
both scopes, he wouldn't have made the report since he would have thought
he had a weather target. He asked me what ATIC thought about the sighting.
I said that Captain James thought it was weather. Just before the long-

distance wires between Dayton and Washington melted, I caught some
comment about people sitting in swivel chairs miles from the closest
radarscope. . . . I took it that he didn't agree the target was caused by
weather. But that's the way it officially stands today.

Although the case of the Lubbock Lights is officially dead, its memory
lingers on. There have never been any more reliable reports of "flying
wings" but lights somewhat similar to those seen by the professors have
been reported. In about 70 per cent of these cases they were proved to be
birds reflecting city lights.

The known elements of the case, the professors' sightings and the photos,
have been dragged back and forth across every type of paper upon which
written material appears, from the cheapest, coarsest pulp to the slick Life
pages. Saucer addicts have studied and offered the case as all-conclusive
proof, with photos, that UFO's are interplanetary. Dr. Donald Menzel of
Harvard studied the case and ripped the sightings to shreds in Look, Time,
and his book, Flying Saucers, with the theory that the professors were
merely looking at refracted city lights. But none of these people even had
access to the full report. This is the first time it has ever been printed.

The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the
complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their
associations with the government, had complete access to our files. And
these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyed fanatics, they were
scientists—rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts. They
had banded together to study our UFO reports because they were convinced
that some of the UFO's that were being reported were interplanetary
spaceships and the Lubbock series was one of these reports. The fact that
the formations of lights were in different shapes didn't bother them; in fact,

it convinced them all the more that their ideas of how a spaceship might
operate were correct.

This group of scientists believed that the spaceships, or at least the part of
the spaceship that came relatively close to the earth, would have to have a
highly swept-back wing configuration. And they believed that for
propulsion and control the craft had a series of small jet orifices all around
its edge. Various combinations of these small jets would be turned on to get
various flight attitudes. The lights that the various observers saw differed in
arrangement because the craft was flying in different flight attitudes.

(Three years later the Canadian Government announced that this was
exactly the way that they had planned to control the flying saucer that they
were trying to build. They had to give up their plans for the development of
the saucer-like craft, but now the project has been taken over by the U.S.
Air Force.)

This is the complete story of the Lubbock Lights as it is carried in the Air
Force files, one of the most interesting and most controversial collection of
UFO sightings ever to be reported to Project Blue Book. Officially all of the
sightings, except the UFO that was picked up on radar, are unknowns.

Personally I thought that the professors' lights might have been some
kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street lights, but I was
wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't refracted light, but they weren't
spaceships. The lights that the professors saw—the backbone of the
Lubbock Light series—have been positively identified as a very
commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon.

It is very unfortunate that I can't divulge exactly the way the answer was
found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set up complete
instrumentation to track down the lights and how he spent several months

testing theory after theory until he finally hit upon the answer. Telling the
story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised
the man complete anonymity. But he fully convinced me that he had the
answer, and after having heard hundreds of explanations of UFO's, I don't
convince easily.

With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights "solved"—the
sightings by the professors—the other phases become only good UFO
reports.

CHAPTER NINE

The New Project Grudge

While I was in Lubbock, Lieutenant Henry Metscher, who was helping
me on Project Grudge, had been sorting out the many bits and pieces of
information that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel
Rosengarten had brought back from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and he
had the answers.

The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling at a
terrific speed because he couldn't lock on to it turned out to be a 400-mile-
an-hour conventional airplane. He'd just gotten fouled up on his procedures
for putting the radar set on automatic tracking. The sighting by the two
officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when Metscher showed how they'd seen a
balloon.

The second radar sighting of the series also turned out to be a balloon.
The frantic phone call from headquarters requesting a reading on the

object's altitude was to settle a bet. Some officers in headquarters had seen
the balloon launched and were betting on how high it was.

The second day's radar sightings were caused by another balloon and
weather—both enhanced by the firm conviction that there were some
mighty queer goings on over Jersey.

The success with the Fort Monmouth Incident had gone to our heads and
we were convinced that with a little diligent digging we'd be knocking off
saucers like an ace skeet-shooter. With all the confidence in the world, I
attacked the Long Beach Incident, which I'd had to drop to go to Lubbock,
Texas. But if saucers could laugh, they were probably zipping through the
stratosphere chuckling to themselves, because there was no neat solution to
this one.

In the original report of how the six F-86's chased the high-flying UFO
over Long Beach, the intelligence officer who made the report had said that
he'd checked all aircraft flights, therefore this wasn't the answer.

The UFO could have been a balloon, so I sent a wire to the Air Force
weather detachment at the Long Beach Municipal Airport. I wanted the
track of any balloon that was in the air at 7:55A.M. on September 23, 1951.
While I was waiting for the answers to my two wires, Lieutenant Metscher
and I began to sort out old UFO reports. It was a big job because back in
1949, when the old Project Grudge had been disbanded, the files had just
been dumped into storage bins. Hank and I now had four filing case
drawers full of a heterogeneous mass of UFO reports, letters, copies of
letters, and memos.

But I didn't get to do much sorting because the mail girl brought in a
copy of a wire that had just arrived. It was a report of a UFO sighting at
Terre Haute, Indiana. I read it and told Metscher that I'd quickly whip out

an answer and get back to helping him sort. But it didn't prove to be that
easy.

The report from Terre Haute said that on October 9, a CAA employee at
Hulman Municipal Airport had observed a silvery UFO. Three minutes later
a pilot, flying east of Terre Haute, had seen a similar object. The report
lacked many details but a few phone calls filled me in on the complete
story.

At 1:43P.M. on the ninth a CAA employee at the airport was walking
across the ramp in front of the administration building. He happened to
glance up at the sky—why, he didn't know—and out of the corner of his eye
he caught a flash of light on the southeastern horizon. He stopped and
looked at the sky where the flash of light had been but he couldn't see
anything. He was just about to walk on when he noticed what he described
as "a pinpoint" of light in the same spot where he'd seen the flash. In a
second or two the "pinpoint" grew larger and it was obvious to the CAA
man that something was approaching the airport at a terrific speed. As he
watched, the object grew larger and larger until it flashed directly overhead
and disappeared to the northwest. The CAA man said it all happened so fast
and he was so amazed that he hadn't called anybody to come out of the
nearby hangar and watch the UFO. But when he'd calmed down he
remembered a few facts. The UFO had been in sight for about fifteen
seconds and during this time it had passed from horizon to horizon. It was
shaped like a "flattened tennis ball," was a bright silver color, and when it
was directly overhead it was "the size of a 50- cent piece held at arm's
length."

But this wasn't all there was to the report. A matter of minutes after the
sighting a pilot radioed Terre Haute that he had seen a UFO. He was flying
from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, when just east of Paris he'd

looked back and to his left. There, level with his airplane and fairly close,
was a large silvery object, "like a flattened orange," hanging motionless in
the sky. He looked at it a few seconds, then hauled his plane around in a
tight left bank. He headed directly toward the UFO, but it suddenly began to
pick up speed and shot off toward the northeast. The time, by the clock on
his instrument panel, was 1:45P.M.—just two minutes after the sighting at
Terre Haute.

When I finished calling I got an aeronautical chart out of the file and
plotted the points of the sighting. The CAA employee had seen the UFO
disappear over the northwestern horizon. The pilot had been flying from
Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, so he'd have been flying on a
heading of just a little less than 270 degrees, or almost straight west. He
was just east of Paris when he'd first seen the UFO, and since he said that
he'd looked back and to his left, the spot where he saw the UFO would be
right at a spot where the CAA man had seen his UFO disappear. Both
observers had checked their watches with radio time just after the sightings,
so there couldn't be more than a few seconds' discrepancy. All I could
conclude was that both had seen the same UFO.

I checked the path of every balloon in the Midwest. I checked the
weather—it was a clear, cloudless day; I had the two observers'
backgrounds checked and I even checked for air traffic, although I knew the
UFO wasn't an airplane. I researched the University of Dayton library for
everything on daylight meteors, but this was no good. From the description
the CAA employee gave, what he'd seen had been a clear-cut, distinct,
flattened sphere, with no smoke trail, no sparks and no tail. A daylight
meteor, so low as to be described as "a 50-cent piece held at arm's length,"
would have had a smoke trail, sparks, and would have made a roar that
would have jolted the Sphinx. This one was quiet. Besides, no daylight
meteor stops long enough to let an airplane turn into it.

Conclusion: Unknown.

In a few days the data from the Long Beach Incident came in and I
started to put it together. A weather balloon had been launched from the
Long Beach Airport, and it was in the vicinity where the six F- 86's had
made their unsuccessful attempt to intercept a UFO. I plotted out the path of
the balloon, the reported path of the UFO, and the flight paths of the F-86's.
The paths of the balloon and the F-86's were accurate, I knew, because the
balloon was being tracked by radio fixes and the F-86's had been tracked by
radar. At only one point did the paths of the balloon, UFO, and F-86's
coincide. When the first two F-86's made their initial visual contact with the
UFO they were looking almost directly at the balloon. But from then on,
even by altering the courses of the F-86's, I couldn't prove a thing.

In addition, the weather observers from Long Beach said that during the
period that the intercept was taking place they had gone outside and looked
at their balloon; it was an exceptionally clear day and they could see it at
unusually high altitudes. They didn't see any F- 86's around it. And one
stronger point, the balloon had burst about ten minutes before the F-86's
lost sight of the UFO.

Lieutenant Metscher took over and, riding on his Fort Monmouth victory,
tried to show how the pilots had seen the balloon. He got the same thing I
did—nothing.

On October 27, 1951, the new Project Grudge was officially established.
I'd written the necessary letters and had received the necessary
endorsements. I'd estimated, itemized, and justified direct costs and
manpower. I'd conferred, inferred, and referred, and now I had the money to
operate. The next step was to pile up all this paper work as an aerial barrier,
let the saucers crash into it, and fall just outside the door.

I was given a very flexible operating policy for Project Grudge because
no one knew the best way to track down UFO's. I had only one restriction
and that was that I wouldn't have my people spending time doing a lot of
wild speculating. Our job would be to analyze each and every UFO report
and try to find what we believed to be an honest, unbiased answer. If we
could not identify the reported object as being a balloon, meteor, planet, or
one of half a hundred other common things that are sometimes called
UFO's, we would mark the folder "Unknown" and file it in a special file. At
some later date, when we built up enough of these "Unknown" reports, we'd
study them.

As long as I was chief of the UFO project, this was our basic rule. If
anyone became anti-flying saucer and was no longer capable of making an
unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went. Conversely anyone who
became a believer was through. We were too busy during the initial phases
of the project to speculate as to whether the unknowns were spaceships,
space monsters, Soviet weapons, or ethereal visions.

I had to let three people go for being too pro or too con.

By the latter part of November 1951 I knew most of what had taken place
in prior UFO projects and what I expected to do. The people in Project Sign
and the old Project Grudge had made many mistakes. I studied these
mistakes and profited by them. I could see that my predecessors had had a
rough job. Mine would be a little bit easier because of the pioneering they
had done.

Lieutenant Metscher and I had sorted out all of the pre-1951 files, refiled
them, studied them, and outlined the future course of the new Project
Grudge.

When Lieut. Colonel Rosengarten and Lieutenant Cummings had been at
the Pentagon briefing Major General Cabell on the Fort Monmouth
incidents, the general had told them to report back when the new project
was formed and ready to go. We were ready to go, but before taking my
ideas to the Pentagon, I thought it might be wise to try them out on a few
other people to get their reaction. Colonel Frank Dunn, then chief of ATIC,
liked this idea. We had many well-known scientists and engineers who
periodically visited ATIC as consultants, and Colonel Dunn suggested that
these people's opinions and comments would be valuable. For the next two
weeks every visitor to ATIC who had a reputation as a scientist, engineer, or
scholar got a UFO briefing.

Unfortunately the names of these people cannot be revealed because I
promised them complete anonymity. But the list reads like a page from
Great Men of Science.

Altogether nine people visited the project during this trial period. Of the
nine, two thought the Air Force was wasting its time, one could be called
indifferent, and six were very enthusiastic over the project. This was a
shock to me. I had expected reactions that ranged from an extremely cold
absolute zero to a mild twenty below. Instead I found out that UFO's were
being freely and seriously discussed in scientific circles. The majority of the
visitors thought that the Air Force had goofed on previous projects and were
very happy to find out that the project was being re-established. All of the
visitors, even the two who thought we were wasting our time, had good
suggestions on what to do. All of them offered their services at any future
time when they might be needed. Several of these people became very good
friends and valuable consultants later on.

About two weeks before Christmas, in 1951, Colonel Dunn and I went to
the Pentagon to give my report. Major General John A. Samford had

replaced Major General Cabell as Director of Intelligence, but General
Samford must have been told about the UFO situation because he was
familiar with the general aspects of the problem. He had appointed his
Assistant for Production, Brigadier General W. M. Garland, to ride herd on
the project for him.

Colonel Dunn briefly outlined to General Samford what we planned to
do. He explained our basic policy, that of setting aside the unknowns and
not speculating on them, and he told how the scientists visiting ATIC had
liked the plans for the new Project Grudge.

There was some discussion about the Air Force's and ATIC's
responsibility for the UFO reports. General Garland stated, and it was later
confirmed in writing, that the Air Force was solely responsible for
investigating and evaluating all UFO reports. Within the Air Force, ATIC
was the responsible agency. This in turn meant that Project Grudge was
responsible for all UFO reports made by any branch of the military service.
I started my briefing by telling General Samford and his staff about the
present UFO situation.

The UFO reports had never stopped coming in since they had first started
in June 1947. There was some correlation between publicity and the number
of sightings, but it was not an established fact that reports came in only
when the press was playing up UFO's. Just within the past few months the
number of good reports had increased sharply and there had been no
publicity.

UFO's were seen more frequently around areas vital to the defense of the
United States. The Los Alamos-Albuquerque area, Oak Ridge, and White
Sands Proving Ground rated high. Port areas, Strategic Air Command bases,
and industrial areas ranked next. UFO's had been reported from every state

in the Union and from every foreign country. The U.S. did not have a
monopoly.

The frequency of the UFO reports was interesting. Every July there was a
sudden increase in the number of reports and July was always the peak
month of the year. Just before Christmas there was usually a minor peak.

The Grudge Report had not been the solution to the UFO problem. It was
true that a large percentage of the reports were due to the "mis-
identification of known objects"; people were seeing balloons, airplanes,
planets, but this was not the final answer. There were a few hoaxes,
hallucinations, publicity-seekers, and fatigued pilots, but reports from these
people constituted less than 1 per cent of the total. Left over was a residue
of very good and very "unexplainable" UFO sightings that were classified
as unknown.

The quality of the reports was getting better, I told the officers; they
contained more details that could be used for analysis and the details were
more precise and accurate. But still they left much to be desired.

Every one of the nine scientists and engineers who had reviewed the
UFO material at ATIC had made one strong point: we should give top
priority to getting reasonably accurate measurements of the speed, altitude,
and size of reported UFO's. This would serve two purposes. First, it would
make it easy to sort out reports of common things, such as balloons,
airplanes, etc. Second, and more important, if we could get even one fairly
accurate measurement that showed that some object was traveling through
the atmosphere at high speed, and that it wasn't a meteor, the UFO riddle
would be much easier to solve.

I had worked out a plan to get some measured data, and I presented it to
the group for their comments.

I felt sure that before long the press would get wind of the Air Force's
renewed effort to identify UFO's. When this happened, instead of being
mysterious about the whole thing, we would freely admit the existence of
the new project, explain the situation thoroughly and exactly as it was, and
say that all UFO reports made to the Air Force would be given careful
consideration. In this way we would encourage more people to report what
they were seeing and we might get some good data.

To further explain my point, I drew a sketch on a blackboard. Suppose
that a UFO is reported over a fair-sized city. Now we may get one or two
reports, and these reports may be rather sketchy. This does us no good—all
we can conclude is that somebody saw something that he couldn't identify.
But suppose fifty people from all over the city report the UFO. Then it
would be profitable for us to go out and talk to these people, find out the
time they saw the UFO, and where they saw it (the direction and height
above the horizon). Then we might be able to use these data, work out a
triangulation problem, and get a fairly accurate measurement of speed,
altitude, and size.

Radar, of course, will give an accurate measurement of speed and
altitude, I pointed out, but radar is not infallible. There is always the
problem of weather. To get accurate radar data on a UFO, it is always
necessary to prove that it wasn't weather that was causing the target. Radar
is valuable, and we wanted radar reports, I said, but they should be
considered only as a parallel effort and shouldn't take the place of visual
sightings.

In winding up my briefing, I again stressed the point that, as of the end of
1951—the date of this briefing—there was no positive proof that any craft
foreign to our knowledge existed. All recommendations for the
reorganization of Project Grudge were based solely upon the fact that there

were many incredible reports of UFO's from many very reliable people. But
they were still just flying saucer reports and couldn't be considered
scientific proof.

Everyone present at the meeting agreed—each had read or had been
briefed on these incredible reports. In fact, two of the people present had
seen UFO's.

Before the meeting adjourned, Colonel Dunn had one last question. He
knew the answer, but he wanted it confirmed. "Does the United States have
a secret weapon that is being reported as a UFO?"

The answer was a flat "No."

In a few days I was notified that my plan had been given the green light. I
already had the plan written up in the form of a staff study so I sent it
through channels for formal approval.

It had been obvious right from the start of the reorganization of Project
Grudge that there would be questions that no one on my staff was
technically competent to answer. To have a fully staffed project, I'd need an
astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, a mathematician, a psychologist, and
probably a dozen other specialists. It was, of course, impossible to have all
of these people on my staff, so I decided to do the next best thing. I would
set up a contract with some research organization who already had such
people on their staff; then I would call on them whenever their services
were needed.

I soon found a place that was interested in such a contract, and the day
after Christmas, Colonel S. H. Kirkland, of Colonel Dunn's staff, and I left
Dayton for a two-day conference with these people to outline what we
wanted. Their organization cannot be identified by name because they are

doing other highly secret work for the government. I'll call them Project
Bear.

Project Bear is a large, well-known research organization in the Midwest.
The several hundred engineers and scientists who make up their staff run
from experts on soils to nuclear physicists. They would make these people
available to me to assist Project Grudge on any problem that might arise
from a UFO report. They did not have a staff astronomer or psychologist,
but they agreed to get them for us on a subcontract basis. Besides providing
experts in every field of science, they would make two studies for us; a
study of how much a person can be expected to see and remember from a
UFO sighting, and a statistical study of UFO reports. The end product of the
study of the powers of observation of a UFO observer would be an
interrogation form.

Ever since the Air Force had been in the UFO business, attempts had
been made to construct a form that a person who had seen a UFO could fill
out. Many types had been tried but all of them had major disadvantages.
Project Bear, working with the psychology department of a university,
would study all of the previous questionnaires, along with actual UFO
reports, and try to come up with as near a perfect interrogation form as
possible. The idea was to make the form simple and yet extract as much and
as accurate data as possible from the observer.

The second study that Project Bear would undertake would be a
statistical study of all UFO reports. Since 1947 the Air Force had collected
about 650 reports, but if our plan to encourage UFO reports worked out the
way we expected this number could increase tenfold. To handle this volume
of reports, Project Bear said that they would set up a complete UFO file on
IBM punch cards. Then if we wanted any bit of information from the files,
it would be a matter of punching a few buttons on an IBM card-sorting

machine, and the files would be sorted electronically in a few seconds.
Approximately a hundred items pertaining to a UFO report would be put on
each card. These items included everything from the time the UFO was
seen to its position in the sky and the observer's personality. The items
punched on the cards would correspond to the items on the questionnaires
that Project Bear was going to develop.

Besides giving us a rapid method of sorting data, this IBM file would
give us a modus operandi file. Our MO file would be similar to the MO
files used by police departments to file the methods of operations of a
criminal. Thus when we received a report we could put the characteristics
of the reported UFO on an IBM punch card, put it into the IBM machine,
and compare it with the characteristics of other sightings that had known
solutions. The answer might be that out of the one hundred items on the
card, ninety-five were identical to previous UFO reports that ducks were
flying over a city at night reflecting the city's lights.

On the way home from the meeting Colonel Kirkland and I were both
well satisfied with the assistance we believed Project Bear could give to
Project Grudge.

In a few days I again left ATIC, this time for Air Defense Command
Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I wanted to find out how
willing ADC was to help us and what they could do. When I arrived I got a
thorough briefing on the operations of ADC and the promise that they
would do anything they could to help solve the UFO riddle.

All of this co-operation was something that I hadn't expected. I'd been
warned by the people who had worked on Project Sign and the old Project
Grudge that everybody hated the word UFO—I'd have to fight for
everything I asked for. But once again they were wrong. The scientists who
visited ATIC, General Samford, Project Bear, and now Air Defense

Command couldn't have been more co-operative. I was becoming aware
that there was much wider concern about UFO reports than I'd ever realized
before.

While I traveled around the United States getting the project set up, UFO
reports continued to come in and all of them were good. One series of
reports was especially good, and they came from a group of people who had
had a great deal of experience watching things in the sky—the people who
launch the big skyhook balloons for General Mills, Inc. The reports of what
the General Mills people had seen while they were tracking their balloons
covered a period of over a year. They had just sent them in because they had
heard that Project Grudge was being reorganized and was taking a different
view on UFO reports. They, like so many other reliable observers, had been
disgusted with the previous Air Force attitude toward UFO reports, and they
had refused to send in any reports. I decided that these people might be a
good source of information, and I wanted to get further details on their
reports, so I got orders to go to Minneapolis. A scientist from Project Bear
went with me. We arrived on January 14, 1952, in the middle of a cold
wave and a blizzard.

The Aeronautical Division of General Mills, Inc., of Wheaties and Betty
Crocker fame, had launched and tracked every skyhook balloon that had
been launched prior to mid-1952. They knew what their balloons looked
like under all lighting conditions and they also knew meteorology,
aerodynamics, astronomy, and they knew UFO's. I talked to these people
for the better part of a full day, and every time I tried to infer that there
might be some natural explanation for the UFO's I just about found myself
in a fresh snowdrift.

What made these people so sure that UFO's existed? In the first place,
they had seen many of them. One man told me that one tracking crew had

seen so many that the sight of a UFO no longer even especially interested
them. And the things that they saw couldn't be explained.

For example: On January 16, 1951, two people from General Mills and
four people from Artesia, New Mexico, were watching a skyhook balloon
from the Artesia airport. They had been watching the balloon off and on for
about an hour when one of the group saw two tiny specks on the horizon,
off to the northwest. He pointed them out to the others because two
airplanes were expected into the airport, and he thought that these might be
the airplanes. But as they watched, the two specks began to move in fast,
and within a few seconds the observers could see that "the airplanes" were
actually two round, dull white objects flying in close formation. The two
objects continued to come in and headed straight toward the balloon. When
they reached the balloon they circled it once and flew off to the northwest,
where they disappeared over the horizon. As the two UFO's circled the
balloon, they tipped on edge and the observers saw that they were disk-
shaped.

When the two UFO's were near the balloon, the observers also had a
chance to compare the size of the UFO's with the size of the balloon. If the
UFO's were as close to the balloon as they appeared to be they would have
been 60 feet in diameter.

After my visit to General Mills, Inc., I couldn't help remembering a
magazine article I'd read about a year before. It said that there was not a
single reliable UFO report that couldn't be attributed to a skyhook balloon.

I'd been back at ATIC only a few days when I found myself packing up to
leave again. This time it was for New York. A high-priority wire had come
into ATIC describing how a Navy pilot had chased a UFO over Mitchel
AFB, on Long Island. It was a good report.

I remember the trip to New York because my train passed through
Elizabeth, New Jersey, early in the morning, and I could see the fires caused
by an American Airlines Convair that had crashed. This was the second of
the three tragic Elizabeth, New Jersey, crashes.

The morning before, on January 21, a Navy pilot had taken off from
Mitchel in a TBM. He was a lieutenant commander, had flown in World
War II, and was now an engineer at the Navy Special Devices Center on
Long Island. At nine-fifty he had cleared the traffic pattern and was at about
2,500 feet, circling around the airfield. He was southeast of the field when
he first noticed an object below him and "about three runway lengths off the
end of Runway 30." The object looked like the top of a parachute canopy,
he told me; it was white and he thought he could see the wedges or panels.
He said that he thought that it was moving across the ground a little bit too
fast to be drifting with wind, but he was sure that somebody had bailed out
and that he was looking at the top of his parachute. He was just ready to call
the tower when he suddenly realized that this "parachute" was drifting
across the wind. He had just taken off from Runway 30 and knew which
direction the wind was blowing.

As he watched, the object, whatever it was (by now he no longer thought
that it was a parachute), began to gradually climb, so he started to climb, he
said, staying above and off to the right of the object. When the UFO started
to make a left turn, he followed and tried to cut inside, but he overshot and
passed over it. It continued to turn and gain speed, so he dropped the nose
of the TBM, put on more power, and pulled in behind the object, which was
now level with him. In a matter of seconds the UFO made a 180-degree turn
and started to make a big swing around the northern edge of Mitchel AFB.
The pilot tried to follow, but the UFO had begun to accelerate rapidly, and
since a TBM leaves much to be desired on the speed end, he was getting
farther and farther behind. But he did try to follow it as long as he could. As

he made a wide turn around the northern edge of the airfield he saw that the
UFO was now turning south. He racked the TBM up into a tight left turn to
follow, but in a few seconds the UFO had disappeared. When he last saw it,
it had crossed the Long Island coast line near Freeport and it was heading
out to sea.

When he finished his account of the chase, I asked the commander some
specific questions about the UFO. He said that just after he'd decided that
the UFO was not a parachute it appeared to be at an altitude of about 200 to
300 feet over a residential section. From the time it took it to cover a city
block, he'd estimated that it was traveling about 300 miles an hour. Even
when he pulled in behind the object and got a good look, it still looked like
a parachute canopy— dome-shaped—white—and it had a dark
undersurface. It had been in sight two and a half minutes.

He had called the control tower at Mitchel during the chase, he told me,
but only to ask if any balloons had been launched. He thought that he might
be seeing a balloon. The tower had told him that there was a balloon in the
area.

Then the commander took out an aeronautical chart and drew in his flight
path and the apparent path of the UFO for me. I think that he drew it
accurately because he had been continually watching landmarks as he'd
chased the UFO and was very careful as he drew the sketches on the map.

I checked with the weather detachment at Mitchel and they said that they
had released a balloon. They had released it at nine-fifty and from a point
southeast of the airfield. I got a plot of its path. Just as in the Long Beach
Incident, where the six F-86's tried to intercept the UFO, the balloon was
almost exactly in line with the spot where the UFO was first seen, but then
any proof you might attempt falls apart. If the pilot knew where he was, and
had plotted his flight path even semi-accurately, he was never over the

balloon. Yet he was over the UFO. He came within less than 2,000 feet of
the UFO when he passed over it; yet he couldn't recognize it as a balloon
even though he thought it might be a balloon since the tower had just told
him that there was one in the area. He said that he followed the UFO around
the north edge of the airfield. Yet the balloon, after it was launched
southeast of the field, continued on a southeast course and never passed
north of the airfield.

But the biggest argument against the object's being a balloon was the fact
that the pilot pulled in behind it; it was directly off the nose of his airplane,
and although he followed it for more than a minute, it pulled away from
him. Once you line up an airplane on a balloon and go straight toward it
you will catch it in a matter of seconds, even in the slowest airplane. There
have been dogfights with UFO's where the UFO's turned out to be balloons,
but the pilots always reported that the UFO "made a pass" at them. In other
words, they rapidly caught up with the balloon and passed it. I questioned
this pilot over and over on this one point, and he was positive that he had
followed directly behind the UFO for over a minute and all the time it was
pulling away from him.

This is one of the most typical UFO reports we had in our files. It is
typical because no matter how you argue there isn't any definite answer. If
you want to argue that the pilot didn't know where he was during the chase
—that he was 3 or 4 miles from where he thought he was—that he never
did fly around the northern edge of the field and get in behind the UFO—
then the UFO could have been a balloon.

But if you want to believe that the pilot knew where he was all during the
chase, and he did have several thousand hours of flying time, then all you
can conclude is that the UFO was an unknown.

I think the pilot summed up the situation very aptly when he told me, "I
don't know what it was, but I've never seen anything like it before or since
—maybe it was a spaceship."

I went back to Dayton stumped—maybe it was a spaceship.

CHAPTER TEN

Project Blue Book and the Big Build-Up

Just twenty minutes after midnight on January 22, 1952, nineteen and a
half hours after the Navy lieutenant commander had chased the UFO near
Mitchel AFB, another incident involving an airplane and something
unknown was developing in Alaska. In contrast with the unusually balmy
weather in New York, the temperature in Alaska that night, according to the
detailed account of the incident we received at ATIC, was a miserable 47
degrees below zero. The action was unfolding at one of our northernmost
radar outposts in Alaska. This outpost was similar to those you may have
seen in pictures, a collection of low, sprawling buildings grouped around
the observatory- -like domes that house the antennae of the most modern
radar in the world. The entire collection of buildings and domes are one
color, solid white, from the plastering of ice and snow. The picture that the
outpost makes could be described as fascinating, something out of a Walt
Disney fantasy—but talk to somebody who's been there—it's miserable.

At 0020, twenty minutes after midnight, an airman watching one of the
outpost's radarscopes saw a target appear. It looked like an airplane because
it showed up as a bright, distinct spot. But it was unusual because it was
northeast of the radar site, and very few airplanes ever flew over this area.
Off to the northeast of the station there was nothing but ice, snow, and

maybe a few Eskimos until you got to Russia. Occasionally a B-50 weather
reconnaissance plane ventured into the area, but a quick check of the
records showed that none was there on this night.

By the time the radar crew had gotten three good plots of the target, they
all knew that it was something unusual—it was at 23,000 feet and traveling
1,500 miles an hour. The duty controller, an Air Force captain, was quickly
called; he made a fast check of the targets that had now been put on the
plotting board and called to a jet fighter-interceptor base for a scramble.

The fighter base, located about 100 miles south of the radar site,
acknowledged the captain's call and in a matter of minutes an F-94 jet was
climbing out toward the north.

While the F-94 was heading north, the radar crew at the outpost watched
the unidentified target. The bright dots that marked its path had moved
straight across the radarscope, passing within about 50 miles of the site. It
was still traveling about 1,500 miles an hour. The radar had also picked up
the F-94 and was directing it toward its target when suddenly the
unidentified target slowed down, stopped, and reversed its course. Now it
was heading directly toward the radar station. When it was within about 30
miles of the station, the radar operator switched his set to a shorter range
and lost both the F-94 and the unidentified target.

While the radar operator was trying to pick up the target again, the F-94
arrived in the area. The ground controller told the pilot that they had lost the
target and asked him to cruise around the area to see if he and his radar
operator could pick up anything on the F-94's radar. The pilot said he would
but that he was having a little difficulty, was low on fuel, and would have to
get back to his base soon. The ground controller acknowledged the pilot's
message, and called back to the air base telling them to scramble a second
F-94.

The first F-94 continued to search the area while the ground radar tried to
pick up the target but neither could find it.

About this time the second F-94 was coming in, so the ground radar
switched back to long range. In a minute they had both of the F-94's and the
unidentified target on their scope. The ground controller called the second
F-94 and began to vector him into the target.

The first F-94 returned to its base.

As both the second F-94 and the target approached the radar site, the
operator again switched to short range and again he lost the jet and the
target. He switched back to long range, but by now they were too close to
the radar site and he couldn't pick up either one.

The pilot continued on toward where the unidentified target should have
been. Suddenly the F-94 radar operator reported a weak target off to the
right at 28,000 feet. They climbed into it but it faded before they could
make contact.

The pilot swung the F-94 around for another pass, and this time the radar
operator reported a strong return. As they closed in, the F- 94's radar
showed that the target was now almost stationary, just barely moving. The
F-94 continued on, but the target seemed to make a sudden dive and they
lost it. The pilot of the jet interceptor continued to search the area but
couldn't find anything. As the F-94 moved away from the radar station, it
was again picked up on the ground radar, but the unidentified target was
gone.

A third F-94 had been scrambled, and in the meantime its crew took over
the search. They flew around for about ten minutes without detecting any
targets on their radar. They were making one last pass almost directly over

the radar station when the radar operator in the back seat of the F-94 yelled
over the interphone that he had a target on his scope. The pilot called
ground radar, but by this time both the F-94 and the unidentified target were
again too close to the radar station and they couldn't be picked up. The F-94
closed in until it was within 200 yards of the target; then the pilot pulled up,
afraid he might collide with whatever was out in the night sky ahead of him.
He made another pass, and another, but each time the bright spot on the
radar operator's scope just stayed in one spot as if something were defiantly
sitting out in front of the F-94 daring the pilot to close in. The pilot didn't
take the dare. On each pass he broke off at 200 yards.

The F-94 crew made a fourth pass and got a weak return, but it was soon
lost as the target seemed to speed away. Ground radar also got a brief
return, but in a matter of seconds they too lost the target as it streaked out of
range on a westerly heading.

As usual, the first thing I did when I read this report was to check the
weather. But there was no weather report for this area that was detailed
enough to tell whether a weather inversion could have caused the radar
targets.

But I took the report over to Captain Roy James, anyway, in hopes that
he might be able to find a clue that would identify the UFO.

Captain James was the chief of the radar section at ATIC. He and his
people analyzed all our reports where radar picked up UFO's. Roy had been
familiar with radar for many years, having set up one of the first stations in
Florida during World War II, and later he took the first aircraft control and
warning squadron to Saipan. Besides worrying about keeping his radar
operating, he had to worry about the Japs' shooting holes in his antennae.

Captain James decided that this Alaskan sighting I'd just shown him was
caused by some kind of freak weather. He based his analysis on the fact that
the unknown target had disappeared each time the ground radar had been
switched to short range. This, he pointed out, is an indication that the radar
was picking up some kind of a target that was caused by weather. The same
weather that caused the ground radar to act up must have caused false
targets on the F-94's radar too, he continued. After all, they had closed to
within 200 yards of what they were supposedly picking up; it was a clear
moonlight night, yet the crews of the F-94's hadn't seen a thing.

Taking a clue from the law profession, he quoted a precedent. About a
year before over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, an F-82 interceptor had nearly
flown into the ground three times as the pilot attempted to follow a target
that his radar operator was picking up. There was a strong inversion that
night, and although the target appeared as if it were flying in the air, it was
actually a ground target.

Since Captain James was the chief of the radar section and he had said
"Weather," weather was the official conclusion on the report. But reports of
UFO's' being picked up on radar are controversial, and some of the people
didn't agree with James's conclusion.

A month or two after we'd received the report, I was out in Colorado
Springs at Air Defense Command Headquarters. I was eating lunch in the
officers' club when I saw an officer from the radar operations section at
ADC. He asked me to stop by his office when I had a spare minute, and I
said that I would. He said that it was important.

It was the middle of the afternoon before I saw him and found out what
he wanted. He had been in Alaska on TDY when the UFO had been picked
up at the outpost radar site. In fact, he had made a trip to both the radar site
and the interceptor base just two days after the sighting, and he had talked

about the sighting with the people who had seen the UFO on the radar. He
wanted to know what we thought about it.

When I told him that the sighting had been written off as weather, I
remember that he got a funny look on his face and said, "Weather! What are
you guys trying to pull, anyway?"

It was obvious that he didn't agree with our conclusion. I was interested
in learning what this man thought because I knew that he was one of ADC's
ace radar trouble shooters and that he traveled all over the world, on loan
from ADC, to work out problems with radars.

"From the description of what the targets looked like on the radarscopes,
good, strong, bright images, I can't believe that they were caused by
weather," he told me.

Then he went on to back up his argument by pointing out that when the
ground radar was switched to short range both the F-94 and the unknown
target disappeared. If just the unknown target had disappeared, then it could
have been weather. But since both disappeared, very probably the radar set
wasn't working on short ranges for some reason. Next he pointed out that if
there was a temperature inversion, which is highly unlikely in northern
Alaska, the same inversion that would affect the ground radar wouldn't be
present at 25,000 feet or above.

I told him about the report from Oak Ridge that Captain James had used
as an example, but he didn't buy this comparison. At Oak Ridge, he pointed
out, that F-82 was at only 4,000 feet. He didn't know how the F-94's could
get to within 200 yards of an object without seeing it, unless the object was
painted a dull black.

"No," he said, "I can't believe that those radar targets were caused by
weather. I'd be much more inclined to believe that they were something
real, something that we just don't know about."

During the early spring of 1952 reports of radar sightings increased
rapidly. Most of them came from the Air Defense Command, but a few
came from other agencies. One day, soon after the Alaskan Incident, I got a
telephone call from the chief of one of the sections of a civilian
experimental radar laboratory in New York State. The people in this lab
were working on the development of the latest types of radar. Several times
recently, while testing radars, they had detected unidentified targets. To
quote my caller, "Some damn odd things are happening that are beginning
to worry me." He went on to tell how the people in his lab had checked
their radars, the weather, and everything else they could think of, but they
could find absolutely nothing to account for the targets; they could only
conclude that they were real. I promised him that his information would get
to the right people if he'd put it in a letter and send it to ATIC. In about a
week the letter arrived—hand-carried by no less than a general. The
general, who was from Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, had been in
New York at the radar laboratory, and he had heard about the UFO reports.
He had personally checked into them because he knew that the people at the
lab were some of the sharpest radar engineers in the world. When he found
out that these people had already contacted us and had prepared a report for
us, he offered to hand-carry it to Wright-Patterson.

I can't divulge how high these targets were flying or how fast they were
going because it would give an indication of the performance of our latest
radar, which is classified Secret. I can say, however, that they were flying
mighty high and mighty fast.

I turned the letter over to ATIC's electronics branch, and they promised to
take immediate action. They did, and really fouled it up. The person who
received the report in the electronics branch was one of the old veterans of
Projects Sign and Grudge. He knew all about UFO's. He got on the phone,
called the radar lab, and told the chief (a man who possibly wrote all of the
textbooks this person had used in college) all about how a weather
inversion can cause false targets on weather. He was gracious enough to tell
the chief of the radar lab to call if he had any more "trouble."

We never heard from them again. Maybe they found out what their
targets were. Or maybe they joined ranks with the airline pilot who told me
that if a flying saucer flew wing tip to wing tip formation with him, he'd
never tell the Air Force.

In early February I made another trip to Air Defense Command
Headquarters in Colorado Springs. This time it was to present a definite
plan of how ADC could assist ATIC in getting better data on UFO's. I
briefed General Benjamin W. Chidlaw, then the Commanding General of
the Air Defense Command, and his staff, telling them about our plan. They
agreed with it in principle and suggested that I work out the details with the
Director of Intelligence for ADC, Brigadier General W. M. Burgess.
General Burgess designated Major Verne Sadowski of his staff to be the
ADC liaison officer with Project Grudge.

This briefing started a long period of close co-operation between Project
Grudge and ADC, and it was a pleasure to work with these people. In all of
my travels around the government, visiting and conferring with dozens of
agencies, I never had the pleasure of working with or seeing a more
smoothly operating and efficient organization than the Air Defense
Command. General Chidlaw and General Burgess, along with the rest of the
staff at ADC, were truly great officers. None of them were believers in

flying saucers, but they recognized the fact that UFO reports were a
problem that must be considered. With technological progress what it is
today, you can't afford to have anything in the air that you can't identify, be
it balloons, meteors, planets or flying saucers.

The plan that ADC agreed to was very simple. They agreed to issue a
directive to all of their units explaining the UFO situation and telling
specifically what to do in case one was detected. All radar units equipped
with radarscope cameras would be required to take scope photos of targets
that fell into the UFO category—targets that were not airplanes or known
weather phenomena. These photos, along with a completed technical
questionnaire that would be made up at ATIC by Captain Roy James, would
be forwarded to Project Grudge.

The Air Defense Command UFO directive would also clarify the
scrambling of fighters to intercept a UFO. Since it is the policy of the Air
Defense Command to establish the identity of any unidentified target, there
were no special orders issued for scrambling fighters to try to identify
reported UFO's. A UFO was something unknown and automatically called
for a scramble. However, there had been some hesitancy on the part of
controllers to send airplanes up whenever radar picked up a target that
obviously was not an airplane. The directive merely pointed out to the
controllers that it was within the scope of existing regulations to scramble
on radar targets that were plotted as traveling too fast or too slow to be
conventional airplanes. The decision to scramble fighters was still up to the
individual controller, however, and scrambling on UFO's would be a second
or third priority.

The Air Defense Command UFO directive did not mention shooting at a
UFO. This question came up during our planning meeting at Colorado
Springs, but, like the authority to scramble, the authority to shoot at

anything in the air had been established long ago. Every ADC pilot knows
the rules for engagement, the rules that tell him when he can shoot the
loaded guns that he always carries. If anything in the air over the United
States commits any act that is covered by the rules for engagement, the pilot
has the authority to open fire.

The third thing that ADC would do would be to integrate the Ground
Observer Corps into the UFO reporting net. As a second priority, the
GOC would report UFO's—first priority would still be reporting
aircraft.

Ever since the new Project Grudge had been organized, we hadn't had to
deal with any large-scale publicity about UFO's. Occasionally someone
would bring in a local item from some newspaper about a UFO sighting,
but the sightings never rated more than an inch or two column space. But on
February 19, 1952, the calm was broken by the story of how a huge ball of
fire paced two B-29's in Korea. The story didn't start a rash of reports as the
story of the first UFO sighting did in June 1947, but it was significant in
that it started a slow build-up of publicity that was far to surpass anything in
the past.

This Korean sighting also added to the growing official interest in
Washington. Almost every day I was getting one or two telephone calls
from some branch of the government, and I was going to Washington at
least once every two weeks. I was beginning to spend as much time telling
people what was going on as I was doing anything about it. The answer was
to get somebody in the Directorate of Intelligence in the Pentagon to act as
a liaison officer. I could keep this person informed and he could handle the
"branch office" in Washington. Colonel Dunn bought this idea, and Major
Dewey J. Fournet got the additional duty of manager of the Pentagon
branch. In the future all Pentagon inquiries went to Major Fournet, and if he

couldn't answer them he would call me. The arrangement was excellent
because Major Fournet took a very serious interest in UFO's and could
always be counted on to do a good job.

Sometime in February 1952 I had a visit from two Royal Canadian Air
Force officers. For some time, I learned, Canada had been getting her share
of UFO reports. One of the latest ones, and the one that prompted the visit
by the RCAF officers, occurred at North Bay, Ontario, about 250 miles
north of Buffalo, New York. On two occasions an orange-red disk had been
seen from a new jet fighter base in the area.

The Canadians wanted to know how we operated. I gave them the details
of how we were currently operating and how we hoped to operate in the
future, as soon as the procedures that were now in the planning stages could
be put into operation. We agreed to try to set up channels so that we could
exchange information and tie in the project they planned to establish with
Project Grudge.

Our plans for continuing liaison didn't materialize, but through other
RCAF intelligence officers I found out that their plans for an RCAF-
sponsored project failed. A quasi-official UFO project was set up soon after
this, however, and its objective was to use instruments to detect objects
coming into the earth's atmosphere. In 1954 the project was closed down
because during the two years of operation they hadn't officially detected any
UFO's. My sources of information stressed the word "officially."

During the time that I was chief of the UFO project, the visitors who
passed through my office closely resembled the international brigade. Most
of the visits were unofficial in the sense that the officers came to ATIC on
other business, but in many instances the other business was just an excuse
to come out to Dayton to get filled in on the UFO story. Two RAF
intelligence officers who were in the U.S. on a classified mission brought

six single-spaced typed pages of questions they and their friends wanted
answered. On many occasions Air Force intelligence officers who were
stationed in England, France, and Germany, and who returned to the U.S.
on business, took back stacks of unclassified flying saucer stories. One
civilian intelligence agent who frequently traveled between the U.S. and
Europe also acted as the unofficial courier for a German group—
transporting hot newspaper and magazine articles about UFO's that I'd
collected. In return I received the latest information on European sightings
—sightings that never were released and that we never received at ATIC
through official channels.

Ever since the fateful day when Lieutenant Jerry Cummings dropped his
horn-rimmed glasses down on his nose, tipped his head forward, peered at
Major General Cabell over his glasses and, acting not at all like a first
lieutenant, said that the UFO investigation was all fouled up, Project
Grudge had been gaining prestige. Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten's
promise that I'd be on the project for only a few months went the way of all
military promises. By March 1952, Project Grudge was no longer just a
project within a group; we had become a separate organization, with the
formal title of the Aerial Phenomena Group. Soon after this step-up in the
chain of command the project code name was changed to Blue Book. The
word "Grudge" was no longer applicable. For those people who like to try
to read a hidden meaning into a name, I'll say that the code name Blue Book
was derived from the title given to college tests. Both the tests and the
project had an abundance of equally confusing questions.

Project Blue Book had been made a separate group because of the
steadily increasing number of reports we were receiving. The average had
jumped from about ten a month to twenty a month since December 1951. In
March of 1952 the reports slacked off a little, but April was a big month. In
April we received ninety-nine reports.

On April 1, Colonel S. H. Kirkland and I went to Los Angeles on
business. Before we left ATIC we had made arrangements to attend a
meeting of the Civilian Saucer Investigators, a now defunct organization
that was very active in 1952.

They turned out to be a well-meaning but Don Quixote-type group of
individuals. As soon as they outlined their plans for attempting to solve the
UFO riddle, it was obvious that they would fail. Project Blue Book had the
entire Air Force, money, and enthusiasm behind it and we weren't getting
any answers yet. All this group had was the enthusiasm.

The highlight of the evening wasn't the Civilian Saucer Investigators,
however; it was getting a chance to read Ginna's UFO article in an advance
copy of Life magazine that the organization had obtained—the article
written from the material Bob Ginna had been researching for over a year.
Colonel Kirkwood took one long look at the article, sidled up to me, and
said, "We'd better get back to Dayton quick; you're going to be busy." The
next morning at dawn I was sound asleep on a United Airlines DC-6,
Dayton-bound.

The Life article undoubtedly threw a harder punch at the American public
than any other UFO article ever written. The title alone, "Have We Visitors
from Outer Space?" was enough. Other very reputable magazines, such as
True, had said it before, but coming from Life, it was different. Life didn't
say that the UFO's were from outer space; it just said maybe. But to back up
this "maybe," it had quotes from some famous people. Dr. Walther Riedel,
who played an important part in the development of the German V-2 missile
and is presently the director of rocket engine research for North American
Aviation Corporation, said he believed that the UFO's were from outer
space. Dr. Maurice Biot, one of the world's leading aerodynamicists, backed
him up.

But the most important thing about the Life article was the question in the
minds of so many readers: "Why was it written?" Life doesn't go blasting
off on flights of space fancy without a good reason. Some of the readers
saw a clue in the author's comments that the hierarchy of the Air Force was
now taking a serious look at UFO reports. "Did the Air Force prompt Life to
write the article?" was the question that many people asked themselves.

When I arrived at Dayton, newspapermen were beating down the door.
The official answer to the Life article was released through the Office of
Public Information in the Pentagon: "The article is factual, but Life's
conclusions are their own." In answer to any questions about the article's
being Air Force-inspired, my weasel- worded answer was that we had
furnished Life with some raw data on specific sightings.

My answer was purposely weasel-worded because I knew that the Air
Force had unofficially inspired the Life article. The "maybe they're
interplanetary" with the "maybe" bordering on "they are" was the personal
opinion of several very high-ranking officers in the Pentagon—so high that
their personal opinion was almost policy. I knew the men and I knew that
one of them, a general, had passed his opinions on to Bob Ginna.

Oddly enough, the Life article did not cause a flood of reports. The day
after the article appeared we got nine sightings, which was unusual, but the
next day they dropped off again.

The number of reports did take a sharp rise a few days later, however.
The cause was the distribution of an order that completed the
transformation of the UFO from a bastard son to the family heir. The piece
of paper that made Project Blue Book legitimate was Air Force Letter 200-
5, Subject: Unidentified Flying Objects. The letter, which was duly signed
and sealed by the Secretary of the Air Force, in essence stated that UFO's
were not a joke, that the Air Force was making a serious study of the

problem, and that Project Blue Book was responsible for the study. The
letter stated that the commander of every Air Force installation was
responsible for forwarding all UFO reports to ATIC by wire, with a copy to
the Pentagon. Then a more detailed report would be sent by airmail. Most
important of all, it gave Project Blue Book the authority to directly contact
any Air Force unit in the United States without going through any chain of
command. This was almost unheard of in the Air Force and gave our project
a lot of prestige.

The new reporting procedures established by the Air Force letter greatly
aided our investigation because it allowed us to start investigating the better
reports before they cooled off. But it also had its disadvantages. It
authorized the sender to use whatever priority he thought the message
warranted. Some things are slow in the military, but a priority message is
not one of them. When it comes into the message center, it is delivered to
the addressee immediately, and for some reason, all messages reporting
UFO's seemed to arrive between midnight and 4:00A.M. I was considered
the addressee on all UFO reports. To complicate matters, the messages were
usually classified and I would have to go out to the air base and personally
sign for them.

One such message came in about 4:30A.M. on May 8, 1952. It was from
a CAA radio station in Jacksonville, Florida, and had been forwarded over
the Flight Service teletype net. I received the usual telephone call from the
teletype room at Wright-Patterson, I think I got dressed, and I went out and
picked up the message. As I signed for it I remember the night man in the
teletype room said, "This is a lulu, Captain."

It was a lulu. About one o'clock that morning a Pan-American airlines
DC-4 was flying south toward Puerto Rico. A few hours after it had left
New York City it was out over the Atlantic Ocean, about 600 miles off

Jacksonville, Florida, flying at 8,000 feet. It was a pitch-black night; a high
overcast even cut out the glow from the stars. The pilot and copilot were
awake but really weren't concentrating on looking for other aircraft because
they had just passed into the San Juan Oceanic Control Area and they had
been advised by radio that there were no other airplanes in the area. The
copilot was turning around to look at number four engine when he noticed a
light up ahead. It looked like the taillight of another airplane. He watched it
closely for a few seconds since no other airplanes were supposed to be in
the area. He glanced out at number four engine for a few seconds, looked
back, and he saw that the light was in about the same position as when he'd
first seen it. Then he looked down at the prop controls, synchronized the
engines, and looked up again. In the few seconds that he had glanced away
from the light, it had moved to the right so that it was now directly ahead of
the DC-4, and it had increased in size. The copilot reached over and slapped
the pilot on the shoulder and pointed. Just at that instant the light began to
get bigger and bigger until it was "ten times the size of a landing light of an
airplane." It continued to close in and with a flash it streaked by the DC-4's
left wing. Before the crew could react and say anything, two more smaller
balls of fire flashed by. Both pilots later said that they sat in their seats for
several seconds with sweat trickling down their backs.

It was one of these two pilots who later said, "Were you ever traveling
along the highway about 70 miles an hour at night, have the car that you
were meeting suddenly swerve over into your lane and then cut back so that
you just miss it by inches? You know the sort of sick, empty feeling you get
when it's all over? That's just the way we felt."

As soon as the crew recovered from the shock, the pilot picked up his
mike, called Jacksonville Radio, and told them about the incident. Minutes
later we had the report. The next afternoon Lieutenant Kerry Rothstien, who

had replaced Lieutenant Metscher on the project, was on his way to New
York to meet the pilots when they returned from Puerto Rico.

When Kerry talked to the two pilots, they couldn't add a great deal to
their original story. Their final comment was the one we all had heard so
many times, "I always thought these people who reported flying saucers
were crazy, but now I don't know."

When Lieutenant Rothstien returned to Dayton he triple-checked with the
CAA for aircraft in the area—but there were none. Could there have been
airplanes in the area that CAA didn't know about? The answer was almost a
flat "No." No one would fly 600 miles off the coast without filing a flight
plan; if he got into trouble or went down, the Coast Guard or Air Rescue
Service would have no idea where to look.

Kerry was given the same negative answer when he checked on surface
shipping.

The last possibility was that the UFO's were meteors, but several points
in the pilots' story ruled these out. First, there was a solid overcast at about
18,000 feet. No meteor cruises along straight and level below 18,000 feet.
Second, on only rare occasions have meteors been seen traveling three in
trail. The chances of seeing such a phenomenon are well over one in a
billion.

Some people have guessed that some kind of an atmospheric
phenomenon can form a "wall of air" ahead of an airplane that will act as a
mirror and that lights seen at night by pilots are nothing more than the
reflection of the airplane's own lights. This could be true in some cases, but
to have a reflection you must have a light to reflect. There are no lights on
an airplane that even approach being "ten times the size of a landing light."

What was it? I know a colonel who says it was the same thing that the
two Eastern Airlines' pilots, Clarence Chiles and John Whitted, saw near
Montgomery, Alabama, on July 24, 1948, and he thinks that Chiles and
Whitted saw a spaceship.

Reports for the month of April set an all-time high. These were all reports
that came from military installations. In addition, we received possibly two
hundred letters reporting UFO's, but we were so busy all we could do was
file them for future reference.

In May 1952 I'd been out to George AFB in California investigating a
series of sightings and was on my way home. I remember the flight to
Dayton because the weather was bad all the way. I didn't want to miss my
connecting flight in Chicago, or get grounded, because I had faithfully
promised my wife that we would go out to dinner the night that I returned to
Dayton. I'd called her from Los Angeles to tell her that I was coming in, and
she had found a baby sitter and had dinner reservations. I hadn't been home
more than about two days a week for the past three months, and she was
looking forward to going out for the evening.

I reached Dayton about midmorning and went right out to the base. When
I arrived at the office, my secretary was gone but there was a big note on
my desk: "Call Colonel Dunn as soon as you get in."

I called Colonel Dunn; then I called my wife and told her to cancel the
baby sitter, cancel the dinner reservations, and pack my other bag. I had to
go to Washington.

While I'd been in California, Colonel Dunn had received a call from
General Samford's office. It seems that a few nights before, one of the top
people in the Central Intelligence Agency was having a lawn party at his
home just outside Alexandria, Virginia. A number of notable personages

were in attendance and they had seen a flying saucer. The report had been
passed down to Air Force intelligence, and due to the quality of the brass
involved, it was "suggested" that I get to Washington on the double and talk
to the host of the party. I was at his office before 5:00P.M. and got his
report.

About ten o'clock in the evening he and two other people were standing
near the edge of his yard talking; he happened to be facing south, looking
off across the countryside. He digressed a bit from his story to explain that
his home is on a hilltop in the country, and when looking south, he had a
view of the entire countryside. While he was talking to the two other people
he noticed a light approaching from the west. He had assumed it was an
airplane and had casually watched it, but when the light got fairly close, the
CIA man said that he suddenly realized there wasn't any sound associated
with it. If it were an airplane it would have been close enough for him to
hear even above the hum of the guests' conversations. He had actually quit
talking and was looking at the light when it stopped for an instant and
began to climb almost vertically. He said something to the other guests, and
they looked up just in time to see the light finish its climb, stop, and level
out. They all watched it travel level for a few seconds, then go into a nearly
vertical dive, level out, and streak off to the east.

Most everyone at the party had seen the light before it disappeared, and
within minutes several friendly arguments as to what it was had developed,
I was told. One person thought it was a lighted balloon, and a retired
general thought it was an airplane. To settle the arguments, they had made a
few telephone calls. I might add that these people were such that the
mention of their names on a telephone got quick results. Radar in the
Washington area said that there had been no airplanes flying west to east
south of Alexandria in the past hour. The weather station at Bolling AFB
said that there were no balloons in the area, but as a double check the

weather people looked at their records of high-altitude winds. It couldn't
have been a balloon because none of the winds up to 65,000 feet were
blowing from west to east—and to be able to see a light on a balloon, it has
to be well below 65,000 feet; the man from CIA told me that they had even
considered the possibility that the UFO was a meteor and that the "jump"
had been due to some kind of an atmospheric distortion. But the light had
been in sight too long to be a meteor. He added that an army chaplain and
two teetotaler guests had also seen the light jump.

There wasn't much left for me to do when I finished talking to the man.
He and his guests had already made all of the checks that I'd have made. All
I could do was go back to Dayton, write up his report, and stamp it
"Unknown."

Back in March, when it had become apparent that the press was reviving
its interest in UFO's, I had suggested that Project Blue Book subscribe to a
newspaper clipping service. Such a service could provide several things.
First, it would show us exactly how much publicity the UFO's were getting
and what was being said, and it would give us the feel of the situation. Then
it would also provide a lot of data for our files. In many cases the
newspapers got reports that didn't go to the Air Force. Newspaper reporters
rival any intelligence officer when it comes to digging up facts, and there
was always the possibility that they would uncover and print something
we'd missed. This was especially true in the few cases of hoaxes that always
accompany UFO publicity. Last, it would provide us with material on which
to base a study of the effect of newspaper publicity upon the number and
type of UFO reports.

Colonel Dunn liked the idea of the clipping service, and it went into
effect soon after the first publicity had appeared. Every three or four days
we would get an envelope full of clippings. In March the clipping service

was sending the clippings to us in letter-sized envelopes. The envelopes
were thin—maybe there would be a dozen or so clippings in each one. Then
they began to get thicker and thicker, until the people who were doing the
clipping switched to using manila envelopes. Then the manila envelopes
began to get thicker and thicker. By May we were up to old shoe boxes. The
majority of the newspaper stories in the shoe boxes were based on material
that had come from ATIC.

All of these inquiries from the press were adding to Blue Book's work
load and to my problems. Normally a military unit such as ATIC has its own
public information officer, but we had none so I was it. I was being quoted
quite freely in the press and was repeatedly being snarled at by someone in
the Pentagon. It was almost a daily occurrence to have people from the
"puzzle palace" call and indignantly ask, "Why did you tell them that?"
They usually referred to some bit of information that somebody didn't think
should have been released. I finally gave up and complained to Colonel
Dunn. I suggested that any contacts with the press be made through the
Office of Public Information in the Pentagon. These people were trained
and paid to do this job; I wasn't. Colonel Dunn heartily agreed because
every time I got chewed out he at least got a dirty look.

Colonel Dunn called General Samford's office and they brought in
General Sory Smith of the Department of Defense, Office of Public
Information. General Smith appointed a civilian on the Air Force Press
Desk, Al Chop, to handle all inquiries from the press. The plan was that Al
would try to get his answers from Major Dewey Fournet, Blue Book's
liaison officer in the Pentagon, and if Dewey didn't have the answer, Al had
permission to call me.

This arrangement worked out fine because Al Chop had been through
previous UFO publicity battles when he was in the Office of Public
Information at Wright Field.

The interest in the UFO's that was shown by the press in May was
surpassed only by the interest of the Pentagon. Starting in May, I gave on
the average of one briefing in Washington every two weeks, and there was
always a full house. From the tone of the official comments to the public
about UFO's, it would indicate that there wasn't a great deal of interest, but

nothing could be further from the truth. People say a lot of things behind a
door bearing a sign that reads "Secret Briefing in Progress."

After one of the briefings a colonel (who is now a brigadier general)
presented a plan that called for using several flights of F- 94C jet
interceptors for the specific purpose of trying to get some good photographs
of UFO's. The flight that he proposed would be an operational unit with six
aircraft—two would be on constant alert. The F-94C's, then the hottest
operational jet we had, would be stripped of all combat gear to give them
peak performance, and they would carry a special camera in the nose. The
squadrons would be located at places in the United States where UFO's
were most frequently seen.

The plan progressed to the point of estimating how soon enough
airplanes for two flights could be stripped, how soon special cameras could
be built, and whether or not two specific Air Force bases in the U.S. could
support the units.

Finally the colonel's plan was shelved, but not because he was considered
to be crazy. After considerable study and debate at high command level, it
was decided that twelve F-94C's couldn't be spared for the job and it would
have been ineffective to use fewer airplanes.

The consideration that the colonel's plan received was an indication of
how some of the military people felt about the importance of finding out
exactly what the UFO's really were. And in the discussions the words
"interplanetary craft" came up more than once.

Requests for briefings came even from the highest figure in the Air
Force, Thomas K. Finletter, then the Secretary for Air. On May 8, 1952,
Lieutenant Colonel R. J. Taylor of Colonel Dunn's staff and I presented an
hour-long briefing to Secretary Finletter and his staff. He listened intently

and asked several questions about specific sightings when the briefing was
finished. If he was at all worried about the UFO's he certainly didn't show
it. His only comment was, "You're doing a fine job, Captain. It must be
interesting. Thank you."

Then he made the following statement for the press:

"No concrete evidence has yet reached us either to prove or disprove the
existence of the so-called flying saucers. There remain, however, a number
of sightings that the Air Force investigators have been unable to explain. As
long as this is true, the Air Force will continue to study flying saucer
reports."

In May 1952, Project Blue Book received seventy-nine UFO reports
compared to ninety-nine in April. It looked as if we'd passed the peak and
were now on the downhill side. The 178 reports of the past two months, not
counting the thousand or so letters that we'd received directly from the
public, had piled up a sizable backlog since we'd had time to investigate and
analyze only the better reports. During June we planned to clear out the
backlog, and then we could relax.

But never underestimate the power of a UFO. In June the big flap hit —
they began to deliver clippings in big cardboard cartons.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Big Flap

In early June 1952, Project Blue Book was operating according to the
operational plan that had been set up in January 1952. It had taken six
months to put the plan into effect, and to a person who has never been

indoctrinated into the ways of the military, this may seem like a long time.
But consult your nearest government worker and you'll find that it was
about par for the red tape course.

We had learned early in the project that about 60 per cent of the reported
UFO's were actually balloons, airplanes, or astronomical bodies viewed
under unusual conditions, so our operational plan was set up to quickly
weed out this type of report. This would give us more time to concentrate
on the unknown cases.

To weed out reports in which balloons, airplanes, and astronomical
bodies were reported as UFO's, we utilized a flow of data that continually
poured into Project Blue Book. We received position reports on all flights of
the big skyhook balloons and, by merely picking up the telephone, we could
get the details about the flight of any other research balloon or regularly
scheduled weather balloon in the United States. The location of aircraft in
an area where a UFO had been reported was usually checked by the
intelligence officer who made the report, but we double-checked his
findings by requesting the location of flights from CAA and military air
bases. Astronomical almanacs and journals, star charts, and data that we got
from observatories furnished us with clues to UFO's that might be
astronomical bodies. All of our investigations in this category of report
were double-checked by Project Bear's astronomer.

Then we had our newspaper clipping file, which gave us many clues.
Hydrographic bulletins and Notams (notices to airmen), published by the
government, sometimes gave us other clues. Every six hours we received a
complete set of weather data. A dozen or more other sources of data that
might shed some light on a reported UFO were continually being studied.

To get all this information on balloons, aircraft, astronomical bodies, and
what have you, I had to co-ordinate Project Blue Book's operational plan

with the Air Force's Air Weather Service, Flight Service, Research and
Development Command, and Air Defense Command with the Navy's Office
of Naval Research, and the aerology branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics;
and with the Civil Aeronautics Administration, Bureau of Standards, several
astronomical observatories, and our own Project Bear. Our entire
operational plan was similar to a Model A Ford I had while I was in high
school—just about the time you would get one part working, another part
would break down.

When a report came through our screening process and still had the
"Unknown" tag on it, it went to the MO file, where we checked its
characteristics against other reports. For example, on May 25 we had a
report from Randolph AFB, Texas. It went through the screening process
and came out "Unknown"; it wasn't a balloon, airplane, or astronomical
body. So then it went to the MO file. It was a flock of ducks reflecting the
city lights. We knew that the Texas UFO's were ducks because our MO file
showed that we had an identical report from Moorhead, Minnesota, and the
UFO's at Moorhead were ducks.

Radar reports that came into Blue Book went to the radar specialists of
ATIC's electronics branch.

Sifting through reams of data in search of the answers to the many
reports that were pouring in each week required many hours of overtime
work, but when a report came out with the final conclusion, "Unknown,"
we were sure that it was unknown.

To operate Project Blue Book, I had four officers, two airmen, and two
civilians on my permanent staff. In addition, there were three scientists
employed full time on Project Bear, along with several others who worked
part time. In the Pentagon, Major Fournet, who had taken on the Blue Book
liaison job as an extra duty, was now spending full time on it. If you add to

this the number of intelligence officers all over the world who were making
preliminary investigations and interviewing UFO observers, Project Blue
Book was a sizable effort.

Only the best reports we received could be personally investigated in the
field by Project Blue Book personnel. The vast majority of the reports had
to be evaluated on the basis of what the intelligence officer who had written
the report had been able to uncover, or what data we could get by telephone
or by mailing out a questionnaire. Our instructions for "what to do before
the Blue Book man arrives," which had been printed in many service
publications, were beginning to pay off and the reports were continually
getting more detailed.

The questionnaire we were using in June 1952 was the one that had
recently been developed by Project Bear. Project Bear, along with
psychologists from a midwestern university, had worked on it for five
months. Many test models had been tried before it reached its final form—
the standard questionnaire that Blue Book is using today.

It ran eight pages and had sixty-eight questions which were booby-
trapped in a couple of places to give us a cross check on the reliability of
the reporter as an observer. We received quite a few questionnaires
answered in such a way that it was obvious that the observer was drawing
heavily on his imagination.

From this standard questionnaire the project worked up two more
specialized types. One dealt with radar sightings of UFO's, the other with
sightings made from airplanes.

In Air Force terminology a "flap" is a condition, or situation, or state of
being of a group of people characterized by an advanced degree of
confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions. It can be brought

on by any number of things, including the unexpected visit of an inspecting
general, a major administrative reorganization, the arrival of a hot piece of
intelligence information, or the dramatic entrance of a well-stacked female
into an officers' club bar.

In early June 1952 the Air Force was unknowingly in the initial stages of
a flap—a flying saucer flap—the flying saucer flap of 1952. The situation
had never been duplicated before, and it hasn't been duplicated since. All
records for the number of UFO reports were not just broken, they were
disintegrated. In 1948, 167 UFO reports had come into ATIC; this was
considered a big year. In June 1952 we received 149. During the four years
the Air Force had been in the UFO business, 615 reports had been collected.
During the "Big Flap" our incoming-message log showed 717 reports.

To anyone who had anything to do with flying saucers, the summer of
1952 was just one big swirl of UFO reports, hurried trips, midnight
telephone calls, reports to the Pentagon, press interviews, and very little
sleep.

If you can pin down a date that the Big Flap started, it would probably be
about June 1.

It was also on June 1 that we received a good report of a UFO that had
been picked up on radar. June 1 was a Sunday, but I'd been at the office all
day getting ready to go to Los Alamos the next day. About 5:00P.M. the
telephone rang and the operator told me that I had a long-distance call from
California. My caller was the chief of a radar test section for Hughes
Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, and he was very excited about a UFO he
had to report.

That morning he and his test crew had been checking out a new late-
model radar to get it ready for some tests they planned to run early Monday

morning. To see if their set was functioning properly, they had been
tracking jets in the Los Angeles area. About midmorning, the Hughes test
engineer told me, the jet traffic had begun to drop off, and they were about
ready to close down their operation when one of the crew picked up a slow-
moving target coming across the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los
Angeles. He tracked the target for a few minutes and, from the speed and
altitude, decided that it was a DC-3. It was at 11,000 feet and traveling
about 180 miles an hour toward Santa Monica. The operator was about
ready to yell at the other crew members to shut off the set when he noticed
something mighty odd— there was a big gap between the last and the rest
of the regularly spaced bright spots on the radarscope. The man on the
scope called the rest of the crew in because DC-3's just don't triple their
speed. They watched the target as it made a turn and started to climb over
Los Angeles. They plotted one, two, three, and then four points during the
target's climb; then one of the crew grabbed a slide rule. Whatever it was, it
was climbing 35,000 feet per minute and traveling about 550 miles an hour
in the process. Then as they watched the scope, the target leveled out for a
few seconds, went into a high- speed dive, and again leveled out at 55,000
feet. When they lost the target, it was heading southeast somewhere near
Riverside, California.

During the sighting my caller told me that when the UFO was only about
ten miles from the radar site two of the crew had gone outside but they
couldn't see anything. But, he explained, even the high- flying jets that they
had been tracking hadn't been leaving vapor trails.

The first thing I asked when the Hughes test engineer finished his story
was if the radar set had been working properly. He said that as soon as the
UFO had left the scope they had run every possible check on the radar and
it was O.K.

I was just about to ask my caller if the target might not have been some
experimental airplane from Edwards AFB when he second-guessed me. He
said that after sitting around looking at each other for about a minute,
someone suggested that they call Edwards. They did, and Edwards' flight
operations told them that they had nothing in the area.

I asked him about the weather. The target didn't look like a weather target
was the answer, but just to be sure, the test crew had checked. One of his
men was an electronics-weather specialist whom he had hired because of
his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of radar under certain weather
conditions. This man had looked into the weather angle. He had gotten the
latest weather data and checked it, but there wasn't the slightest indication
of an inversion or any other weather that would cause a false target.

Just before I hung up I asked the man what he thought he and his crew
had picked up, and once again I got the same old answer: "Yesterday at this
time any of us would have argued for hours that flying saucers were a
bunch of nonsense but now, regardless of what you'll say about what we
saw, it was something damned real."

I thanked the man for calling and hung up. We couldn't make any more of
an analysis of this report than had already been made, it was another
unknown.

I went over to the MO file and pulled out the stack of cards behind the
tab "High-Speed Climb." There must have been at least a hundred cards,
each one representing a UFO report in which the reported object made a
high-speed climb. But this was the first time radar had tracked a UFO
during a climb.

During the early part of June, Project Blue Book took another jump up on
the organizational chart. A year before the UFO project had consisted of one

officer. It had risen from the one-man operation to a project within a group,
then to a group, and now it was a section. Neither Project Sign nor the old
Project Grudge had been higher than the project-within-a-group level. The
chief of a group normally calls for a lieutenant colonel, and since I was just
a captain this caused some consternation in the ranks. There was some talk
about putting Lieutenant Colonel Ray Taylor of Colonel Dunn's staff in
charge. Colonel Taylor was very much interested in UFO's; he had handled
some of the press contacts prior to turning this function over to the
Pentagon and had gone along with me on briefings, so he knew something
about the project. But in the end Colonel Donald Bower, who was my
division chief, decided rank be damned, and I stayed on as chief of Project
Blue Book.

The location within the organizational chart is always indicative of the
importance placed on a project. In June 1952 the Air Force was taking the
UFO problem seriously. One of the reasons was that there were a lot of
good UFO reports coming in from Korea. Fighter pilots reported seeing
silver-colored spheres or disks on several occasions, and radar in Japan,
Okinawa, and in Korea had tracked unidentified targets.

In June our situation map, on which we kept a plot of all of our sightings,
began to show an ever so slight trend toward reports beginning to bunch up
on the east coast. We discussed this build-up, but we couldn't seem to find
any explainable reason for it so we decided that we'd better pay special
attention to reports coming from the eastern states.

I had this build-up of reports in mind one Sunday night, June 15 to be
exact, when the OD at ATIC called me at home and said that we were
getting a lot of reports from Virginia. Each report by itself wasn't too good,
the OD told me, but together they seemed to mean something. He suggested
that I come out and take a look at them—so I did.

Individually they weren't too good, but when I lined them up
chronologically and plotted them on a map they took the form of a hot
report.

At 3:40P.M. a woman at Unionville, Virginia, had reported a "very shiny
object" at high altitude.

At 4:20P.M. the operators of the CAA radio facility at Gordonsville,
Virginia, had reported that they saw a "round, shiny object." It was
southeast of their station, or directly south of Unionville.

At 4:25P.M. the crew of an airliner northwest of Richmond, Virginia,
reported a "silver sphere at eleven o'clock high."

At 4:43P.M. a Marine pilot in a jet tried to intercept a "round shiny
sphere" south of Gordonsville.

At 5:43P.M. an Air Force T-33 jet tried to intercept a "shiny sphere" south
of Gordonsville. He got above 35,000 feet and the UFO was still far above
him.

At 7:35P.M. many people in Blackstone, Virginia, about 80 miles south
of Gordonsville, reported it. It was a "round, shiny object with a golden
glow" moving from north to south. By this time radio commentators in
central Virginia were giving a running account of the UFO's progress.

At 7:59P.M. the people in the CAA radio facility at Blackstone saw it.

At 8:00P.M. jets arrived from Langley AFB to attempt to intercept it, but
at 8:05P.M. it disappeared.

This was a good report because it was the first time we ever received a
series of reports on the same object, and there was no doubt that all these

people had reported the same object. Whatever it was, it wasn't moving too
fast, because it had traveled only about 90 miles in four hours and twenty-
five minutes. I was about ready to give up until morning and go home when
my wife called. The local Associated Press man had called our home and
she assumed that it was about this sighting. She had just said that I was out
so he might not call the base. I decided that I'd better keep working so I'd
have the answer in time to keep the story out of the papers. A report like this
could cause some excitement.

The UFO obviously wasn't a planet because it was moving from north to
south, and it was too slow to be an airplane. I called the balloon- plotting
center at Lowry AFB, where the tracks of the big skyhook balloons are
plotted, but the only big balloons in the air were in the western United
States, and they were all accounted for.

It might have been a weather balloon. The wind charts showed that the
high-altitude winds were blowing in different directions at different
altitudes above 35,000 feet, so there was no one flow of air that could have
brought a balloon in from a certain area, and I knew that the UFO had to be
higher than 35,000 feet because the T-33 jet had been this high and the UFO
was still above it. The only thing to do was to check with all of the weather
stations in the area. I called Richmond, Roanoke, several places in the
vicinity of Washington, D.C., and four or five other weather stations, but all
of their balloons were accounted for and none had been anywhere close to
the central part of Virginia.

A balloon can travel only so far, so there was no sense in checking
stations too far away from where the people had seen the UFO, but I took a
chance and called Norfolk; Charleston, West Virginia; Altoona,
Pennsylvania; and other stations within a 150-mile radius of Gordonsville
and Blackstone. Nothing.

I still thought it might be a balloon, so I started to call more stations. At
Pittsburgh I hit a lead. Their radiosonde balloon had gone up to about
60,000 feet and evidently had sprung a slow leak because it had leveled off
at that altitude. Normally balloons go up till they burst at 80,000 or 90,000
feet. The weather forecaster at Pittsburgh said that their records showed
they had lost contact with the balloon when it was about 60 miles southeast
of their station. He said that the winds at 60,000 feet were constant, so it
shouldn't be too difficult to figure out where the balloon went after they had
lost it. Things must be dull in Pittsburgh at 2:00 a.m. on Monday mornings,
because he offered to plot the course that the balloon probably took and call
me back.

In about twenty minutes I got my call. It probably was their balloon, the
forecaster said. Above 50,000 feet there was a strong flow of air southeast
from Pittsburgh, and this fed into a stronger southerly flow that was
paralleling the Atlantic coast just east of the Appalachian Mountains. The
balloon would have floated along in this flow of air like a log floating down
a river. As close as he could estimate, he said, the balloon would arrive in
the Gordonsville- Blackstone area in the late afternoon or early evening.
This was just about the time the UFO had arrived.

"Probably a balloon" was a good enough answer for me.

The next morning at 8:00A.M., Al Chop called from the Pentagon to tell
me that people were crawling all over his desk wanting to know about a
sighting in Virginia.

The reports continued to come in. At Walnut Lake, Michigan, a group of
people with binoculars watched a "soft white light" go back and forth across
the western sky for nearly an hour. A UFO "paced" an Air Force B-25 for
thirty minutes in California. Both of these happened on June 18, and
although we checked and rechecked them, they came out as unknowns.

On June 19 radar at Goose AFB in Newfoundland picked up some odd
targets. The targets came across the scope, suddenly enlarged, and then
became smaller again. One unofficial comment was that the object was flat
or disk-shaped, and that the radar target had gotten bigger because the disk
had banked in flight to present a greater reflecting surface. ATIC's official
comment was weather.

Goose AFB was famous for unusual reports. In early UFO history
someone had taken a very unusual colored photo of a "split cloud." The
photographer had seen a huge ball of fire streak down through the sky and
pass through a high layer of stratus clouds. As the fireball passed through
the cloud it cut out a perfect swath. The conclusion was that the fireball was
a meteor, but the case is still one of the most interesting in the file because
of the photograph.

Then in early 1952 there was another good report from this area. It was
an unknown.

The incident started when the pilot of an Air Force C-54 transport
radioed Goose AFB and said that at 10:42P.M. a large fireball had buzzed
his airplane. It had come in from behind the C-54, and nobody had seen it
until it was just off the left wing. The fireball was so big that the pilot said it
looked as if it was only a few hundred feet away. The C-54 was 200 miles
southwest, coming into Goose AFB from Westover AFB, Massachusetts,
when the incident occurred. The base officer-of-the-day, who was also a
pilot, happened to be in the flight operations office at Goose when the
message came in and he overheard the report. He stepped outside, walked
over to his command car, and told his driver about the radio message, so the
driver got out and both of them looked toward the south. They searched the
horizon for a few seconds; then suddenly they saw a light closing in from
the southwest. Within a second, it was near the airfield. It had increased in

size till it was as big as a "golf ball at arm's length," and it looked like a big
ball of fire. It was so low that both the OD and his driver dove under the
command car because they were sure it was going to hit the airfield. When
they turned and looked up they saw the fireball make a 90-degree turn over
the airfield and disappear into the northwest. The time was 10:47P.M.

The control tower operators saw the fireball too, but didn't agree with the
OD and his driver on how low it was. They did think that it had made a 90-
degree turn and they didn't think that it was a meteor. In the years they'd
been in towers they'd seen hundreds of meteors, but they'd never seen
anything like this, they reported.

And reports continued to pour into Project Blue Book. It was now not
uncommon to get ten or eleven wires in one day. If the letters reporting
UFO sightings were counted, the total would rise to twenty or thirty a day.
The majority of the reports that came in by wire could be classified as being
good. They were reports made by reliable people and they were full of
details. Some were reports of balloons, airplanes, etc., but the percentage of
unknowns hovered right around 22 per cent.

To describe and analyze each report, or even the unknowns, would
require a book the size of an unabridged dictionary, so I am covering only
the best and most representative cases.

One day in mid-June, Colonel Dunn called me. He was leaving for
Washington and he wanted me to come in the next day to give a briefing at
a meeting. By this time I was taking these briefings as a matter of course.
We usually gave the briefings to General Garland and a general from the
Research and Development Board, who passed the information on to
General Samford, the Director of Intelligence. But this time General
Samford, some of the members of his staff, two Navy captains from the

Office of Naval Intelligence, and some people I can't name were at the
briefing.

When I arrived in Washington, Major Fournet told me that the purpose of
the meetings, and my briefing, was to try to find out if there was any
significance to the almost alarming increase in UFO reports over the past
few weeks. By the time that everyone had finished signing into the briefing
room in the restricted area of the fourth-floor "B" ring of the Pentagon, it
was about 9:15A.M. I started my briefing as soon as everyone was seated.

I reviewed the last month's UFO activities; then I briefly went over the
more outstanding "Unknown" UFO reports and pointed out how they were
increasing in number—breaking all previous records. I also pointed out that
even though the UFO subject was getting a lot of publicity, it wasn't the
scare-type publicity that had accompanied the earlier flaps—in fact, much
of the present publicity was anti- saucer.

Then I went on to say that even though the reports we were getting were
detailed and contained a great deal of good data, we still had no proof the
UFO's were anything real. We could, I said, prove that all UFO reports were
merely the misinterpretation of known objects if we made a few
assumptions.

At this point one of the colonels on General Samford's staff stopped me.
"Isn't it true," he asked, "that if you make a few positive assumptions
instead of negative assumptions you can just as easily prove that the UFO's
are interplanetary spaceships? Why, when you have to make an assumption
to get an answer to a report, do you always pick the assumption that proves
the UFO's don't exist?"

You could almost hear the colonel add, "O.K., so now I've said it."

For several months the belief that Project Blue Book was taking a
negative attitude and the fact that the UFO's could be interplanetary
spaceships had been growing in the Pentagon, but these ideas were usually
discussed only in the privacy of offices with doors that would close tight.

No one said anything, so the colonel who had broken the ice plunged in.
He used the sighting from Goose AFB, where the fireball had buzzed the C-
54 and sent the OD and his driver belly-whopping under the command car
as an example. The colonel pointed out that even though we had labeled the
report "Unknown" it wasn't accepted as proof. He wanted to know why.

I said that our philosophy was that the fireball could have been two
meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across the
airfield at Goose AFB. Granted a meteor doesn't come within feet of an
airplane or make a 90-degree turn, but these could have been optical
illusions of some kind. The crew of the C-54, the OD, his driver, and the
tower operators didn't recognize the UFO's as meteors because they were
used to seeing the normal "shooting stars" that are most commonly seen.

But the colonel had some more questions. "What are the chances of
having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling the
same direction, only five minutes apart?"

I didn't know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather small,
I had to admit.

Then he asked, "What kind of an optical illusion would cause a meteor to
appear to make a 90-degree turn?"

I had asked our Project Bear astronomer this same question, and he
couldn't answer it either. So the only answer I could give the colonel was, "I

don't know." I felt as if I were on a witness stand being cross-examined, and
that is exactly where I was, because the colonel cut loose.

"Why not assume a point that is more easily proved?" he asked. "Why
not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators
did know what they were talking about? Maybe they had seen spectacular
meteors during the hundreds of hours that they had flown at night and the
many nights that they had been on duty in the tower. Maybe the ball of fire
had made a 90-degree turn. Maybe it was some kind of an intelligently
controlled craft that had streaked northeast across the Gulf of St. Lawrence
and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an hour.

"Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?" the
colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.

This last comment started a lively discussion, and I was able to retreat.
The colonel had been right in a sense—we were being conservative, but
maybe this was the right way to be. In any scientific investigation you
always assume that you don't have enough proof until you get a positive
answer. I don't think that we had a positive answer—yet.

The colonel's comments split the group, and a hot exchange of ideas, pros
and cons, and insinuations that some people were imitating ostriches to
keep from facing the truth followed.

The outcome of the meeting was a directive to take further steps to obtain
positive identification of the UFO's. Our original idea of attempting to get
several separate reports from one sighting so we could use triangulation to
measure speed, altitude, and size wasn't working out. We had given the idea
enough publicity, but reports where triangulation could be used were few
and far between. Mr. or Mrs. Average Citizen just doesn't look up at the sky
unless he or she sees a flash of light or hears a sound. Then even if he or she

does look up and sees a UFO, it is very seldom that the report ever gets to
Project Blue Book. I think that it would be safe to say that Blue Book only
heard about 10 per cent of the UFO's that were seen in the United States.

After the meeting I went back to ATIC, and the next day Colonel Don
Bower and I left for the west coast to talk to some people about how to get
better UFO data. We brought back the idea of using an extremely long
focal-length camera equipped with a diffraction grating.

The cameras would be placed at various locations throughout the United
States where UFO's were most frequently seen. We hoped that photos of the
UFO's taken through the diffraction gratings would give us some proof one
way or the other.

The diffraction gratings we planned to use over the lenses of the cameras
were the same thing as prisms; they would split up the light from the UFO
into its component parts so that we could study it and determine whether it
was a meteor, an airplane, or balloon reflecting sunlight, etc. Or we might
be able to prove that the photographed UFO was a craft completely foreign
to our knowledge.

A red-hot, A-l priority was placed on the camera project, and a section at
ATIC that developed special equipment took over the job of obtaining the
cameras, or, if necessary, having them designed and built.

But the UFO's weren't waiting around till they could be photographed.
Every day the tempo and confusion were increasing a little more.

By the end of June it was very noticeable that most of the better reports
were coming from the eastern United States. In Massachusetts, New Jersey,
and Maryland jet fighters had been scrambled almost nightly for a week. On

three occasions radar-equipped F-94's had locked on aerial targets only to
have the lock-on broken by the apparent violent maneuvers of the target.

By the end of June there was also a lull in the newspaper publicity about
the UFO's. The forthcoming political conventions had wiped out any
mention of flying saucers. But on July 1 there was a sudden outbreak of
good reports. The first one came from Boston; then they worked down the
coast.

About seven twenty-five on the morning of July 1 two F-94's were
scrambled to intercept a UFO that a Ground Observer Corps spotter
reported was traveling southwest across Boston. Radar couldn't pick it up so
the two airplanes were just vectored into the general area. The F-94's
searched the area but couldn't see anything. We got the report at ATIC and
would have tossed it out if it hadn't been for other reports from the Boston
area at that same time.

One of these reports came from a man and his wife at Lynn,
Massachusetts, nine miles northeast of Boston. At seven-thirty they had
noticed the two vapor trails from the climbing jet interceptors. They looked
around the sky to find out if they could see what the jets were after and off
to the west they saw a bright silver "cigar- shaped object about six times as
long as it was wide" traveling southwest across Boston. It appeared to be
traveling just a little faster than the two jets. As they watched they saw that
an identical UFO was following the first one some distance back. The
UFO's weren't leaving vapor trails but, as the man mentioned in his report,
this didn't mean anything because you can get above the vapor trail level.
And the two UFO's appeared to be at a very high altitude. The two
observers watched as the two F-94's searched back and forth far below the
UFO's.

Then there was another report, also made at seven-thirty. An Air Force
captain was just leaving his home in Bedford, about 15 miles northwest of
Boston and straight west of Lynn, when he saw the two jets. In his report he
said that he, too, had looked around the sky to see if he could see what they
were trying to intercept when off to the east he saw a "silvery cigar-shaped
object" traveling south. His description of what he observed was almost
identical to what the couple in Lynn reported except that he saw only one
UFO.

When we received the report, I wanted to send someone up to Boston
immediately in the hope of getting more data from the civilian couple and
the Air Force captain; this seemed to be a tailor-made case for triangulation.
But by July 1 we were completely snowed under with reports, and there just
wasn't anybody to send. Then, to complicate matters, other reports came in
later in the day.

Just two hours after the sighting in the Boston area Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey, popped back into UFO history. At nine-thirty in the morning twelve
student radar operators and three instructors were tracking nine jets on an
SCR 584 radar set when two UFO targets appeared on the scope. The two
targets came in from the northeast at a slow speed, much slower than the
jets that were being tracked, hovered near Fort Monmouth at 50,000 feet for
about five minutes, and then took off in a "terrific burst of speed" to the
southwest.

When the targets first appeared, some of the class went outside with an
instructor, and after searching the sky for about a minute, they saw two
shiny objects in the same location as the radar showed the two unidentified
targets to be. They watched the two UFO's for several minutes and saw
them go zipping off to the southwest at exactly the same time that the two
radar targets moved off the scope in that direction.

We had plotted these reports, the ones from Boston and the one from Fort
Monmouth, on a map, and without injecting any imagination or wild
assumptions, it looked as if two "somethings" had come down across
Boston on a southwesterly heading, crossed Long Island, hovered for a few
minutes over the Army's secret laboratories at Fort Monmouth, then
proceeded toward Washington. In a way we half expected to get a report
from Washington. Our expectations were rewarded because in a few hours a
report arrived from that city.

A physics professor at George Washington University reported a "dull,
gray, smoky-colored" object which hovered north northwest of Washington
for about eight minutes. Every once in a while, the professor reported, it
would move through an arc of about 15 degrees to the right or left, but it
always returned to its original position. While he was watching the UFO he
took a 25-cent piece out of his pocket and held it at arm's length so that he
could compare its size to that of the UFO. The UFO was about half the
diameter of the quarter. When he first saw the UFO, it was about 30 to 40
degrees above the horizon, but during the eight minutes it was in sight it
steadily dropped lower and lower until buildings in downtown Washington
blocked off the view.

Besides being an "Unknown," this report was exceptionally interesting to
us because the sighting was made from the center of downtown
Washington, D.C. The professor reported that he had noticed the UFO when
he saw people all along the street looking up in the air and pointing. He
estimated that at least 500 people were looking at it, yet his was the only
report we received. This seemed to substantiate our theory that people are
very hesitant to report UFO's to the Air Force. But they evidently do tell the
newspapers because later on we picked up a short account of the sighting in
the Washington papers. It merely said that hundreds of calls had been
received from people reporting a UFO.

When reports were pouring in at the rate of twenty or thirty a day, we
were glad that people were hesitant to report UFO's, but when we were
trying to find the answer to a really knotty sighting we always wished that
more people had reported it. The old adage of having your cake and eating
it, too, held even for the UFO.

Technically no one in Washington, besides, of course, Major General
Samford and his superiors, had anything to do with making policy decisions
about the operation of Project Blue Book or the handling of the UFO
situation in general. Nevertheless, everyone was trying to get into the act.
The split in opinions on what to do about the rising tide of UFO reports, the
split that first came out in the open at General Samford's briefing, was
widening every day. One group was getting dead-serious about the
situation. They thought we now had plenty of evidence to back up an
official statement that the UFO's were something real and, to be specific,
not something from this earth. This group wanted Project Blue Book to quit
spending time investigating reports from the standpoint of trying to
determine if the observer of a UFO had actually seen something foreign to
our knowledge and start assuming that he or she had. They wanted me to
aim my investigation at trying to find out more about the UFO. Along with
this switch in operating policy, they wanted to clamp down on the release of
information. They thought that the security classification of the project
should go up to Top Secret until we had all of the answers, then the
information should be released to the public. The investigation of UFO's
along these lines should be a maximum effort, they thought, and their plans
called for lining up many top scientists to devote their full time to the
project. Someone once said that enthusiasm is infectious, and he was right.
The enthusiasm of this group took a firm hold in the Pentagon, at Air
Defense Command Headquarters, on the Research and Development Board,
and many other agencies throughout the government. But General Samford

was still giving the orders, and he said to continue to operate just as we had
—keeping an open mind to any ideas.

After the minor flurry of reports on July 1 we had a short breathing spell
and found time to clean up a sizable backlog of reports. People were still
seeing UFO's but the frequency of the sighting curve was dropping steadily.
During the first few days of July we were getting only two or three good
reports a day.

On July 5 the crew of a non-scheduled airliner made page two of many
newspapers by reporting a UFO over the AEC's supersecret Hanford,
Washington, installation. It was a skyhook balloon. On the twelfth a huge
meteor sliced across Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri that netted us
twenty or thirty reports. Even before they had stopped coming in, we had
confirmation from our astronomer that the UFO was a meteor.

But forty-two minutes later there was a sighting in Chicago that wasn't so
easily explained.

According to our weather records, on the night of July 12 it was hot in
Chicago. At nine forty-two there were at least 400 people at Montrose
Beach trying to beat the heat. Many of them were lying down looking at the
stars, so that they saw the UFO as it came in from the west northwest, made
a 180-degree turn directly over their heads, and disappeared over the
horizon. It was a "large red light with small white lights on the side," most
of the people reported. Some of them said that it changed to a single yellow
light as it made its turn. It was in sight about five minutes, and during this
time no one reported hearing any sound.

One of the people at the beach was the weather officer from O'Hare
International Airport, an Air Force captain. He immediately called
O'Hare. They checked on balloon flights and with radar, but both were

negative; radar said that there had been no aircraft in the area of
Montrose Beach for several hours.

I sent an investigator to Chicago, and although he came back with a lot of
data on the sighting, it didn't add up to be anything known.

The next day Dayton had its first UFO sighting in a long time when a Mr.
Roy T. Ellis, president of the Rubber Seal Products Company, and many
other people, reported a teardrop-shaped object that hovered over Dayton
for several minutes about midnight. This sighting had an interesting twist
because two years later I was in Dayton and stopped in at ATIC to see a
friend who is one of the technical advisers at the center.

Naturally the conversation got around to the subject of UFO's, and he
asked me if I remembered this specific sighting. I did, so he went on to say
that he and his wife had seen this UFO that night but they had never told
anybody. He was very serious when he admitted that he had no idea what it
could have been. Now I'd heard this statement a thousand times before from
other people, but coming from this person, it was really something because
he was as anti-saucer as anyone I knew. Then he added, "From that time on
I didn't think your saucer reporters were as crazy as I used to think they
were."

The Dayton sighting also created quite a stir in the press. In conjunction
with the sighting, the Dayton Daily Journal had interviewed Colonel
Richard H. Magee, the Dayton-Oakwood civil defense director; they
wanted to know what he thought about the UFO's. The colonel's answer
made news: "There's something flying around in our skies and we wish we
knew what it was."

When the story broke in other papers, the colonel's affiliation with civil
defense wasn't mentioned, and he became merely "a colonel from Dayton."

Dayton was quickly construed by the public to mean Wright- Patterson AFB
and specifically ATIC. Some people in the Pentagon screamed while others
gleefully clapped their hands. The gleeful handclaps were from those
people who wanted the UFO's to be socially recognized, and they believed
that if they couldn't talk their ideas into being they might be able to force
them in with the help of this type of publicity.

The temporary lull in reporting that Project Blue Book had experienced
in early July proved to be only the calm before the storm. By mid-July we
were getting about twenty reports a day plus frantic calls from intelligence
officers all over the United States as every Air Force installation in the U.S.
was being swamped with reports. We told the intelligence officers to send in
the ones that sounded the best.

The build-up in UFO reports wasn't limited to the United States— every
day we would receive reports from our air attaches in other countries.
England and France led the field, with the South American countries
running a close third. Needless to say, we didn't investigate or evaluate
foreign reports because we had our hands full right at home.

Most of us were putting in fourteen hours a day, six days a week. It
wasn't at all uncommon for Lieutenant Andy Flues, Bob Olsson, or Kerry
Rothstien, my investigators, to get their sleep on an airliner going out or
coming back from an investigation. TWA airliners out of Dayton were more
like home than home. But we hadn't seen anything yet.

All the reports that were coming in were good ones, ones with no
answers. Unknowns were running about 40 percent. Rumors persist that in
mid-July 1952 the Air Force was braced for an expected invasion by flying
saucers. Had these rumormongers been at ATIC in mid-July they would
have thought that the invasion was already in full swing. And they would
have thought that one of the beachheads for the invasion was Patrick AFB,

the Air Force's Guided Missile Long-Range Proving Ground on the east
coast of Florida.

On the night of July 18, at ten forty-five, two officers were standing in
front of base operations at Patrick when they noticed a light at about a 45-
degree angle from the horizon and off to the west. It was an amber color
and "quite a bit brighter than a star." Both officers had heard flying saucer
stories, and both thought the light was a balloon. But, to be comedians, they
called to several more officers and airmen inside the operations office and
told them to come out and "see the flying saucer." The people came out and
looked. A few were surprised and took the mysterious light seriously, at the
expense of considerable laughter from the rest of the group. The discussion
about the light grew livelier and bets that it was a balloon were placed. In
the meantime the light had drifted over the base, had stopped for about a
minute, turned, and was now heading north. To settle the bet, one of the
officers stepped into the base weather office to find out about the balloon.
Yes, one was in the air and being tracked by radar, he was told. The weather
officer said that he would call to find out exactly where it was. He called
and found out that the weather balloon was being tracked due west of the
base and that the light had gone out about ten minutes before. The officer
went back outside to find that what was first thought to be a balloon was
now straight north of the field and still lighted. To add to the confusion, a
second amber light had appeared in the west about 20 degrees lower than
where the first one was initially seen, and it was also heading north but at a
much greater speed. In a few seconds the first light stopped and started
moving back south over the base.

While the group of officers and airmen were watching the two lights, the
people from the weather office came out to tell the UFO observers that the
balloon was still traveling straight west. They were just in time to see a
third light come tearing across the sky, directly overhead, from west to east.

A weatherman went inside and called the balloon-tracking crew again—
their balloon was still far to the west of the base.

Inside of fifteen minutes two more amber lights came in from the west,
crossed the base, made a 180-degree turn over the ocean, and came back
over the observers.

In the midst of the melee a radar set had been turned on but it couldn't
pick up any targets. This did, however, eliminate the possibility of the
lights' being aircraft. They weren't stray balloons either, because the winds
at all altitudes were blowing in a westerly direction. They obviously weren't
meteors. They weren't searchlights on a haze layer because there was no
weather conducive to forming a haze layer and there were no searchlights.
They could have been some type of natural phenomenon, if one desires to
take the negative approach. Or, if you take the positive approach, they could
have been spaceships.

The next night radar at Washington National Airport picked up UFO's
and one of the most highly publicized sightings of UFO history was in the
making. It marked the beginning of the end of the Big Flap.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Washington Merry-Go-Round

No flying saucer report in the history of the UFO ever won more world
acclaim than the Washington National Sightings.

When radars at the Washington National Airport and at Andrews AFB,
both close to the nation's capital, picked up UFO's, the sightings beat the
Democratic National Convention out of headline space. They created such a

furor that I had inquiries from the office of the President of the United
States and from the press in London, Ottawa, and Mexico City. A junior-
sized riot was only narrowly averted in the lobby of the Roger Smith Hotel
in Washington when I refused to tell U.S. newspaper reporters what I knew
about the sightings.

Besides being the most highly publicized UFO sightings in the Air Force
annals, they were also the most monumentally fouled-up messes that repose
in the files. Although the Air Force said that the incident had been fully
investigated, the Civil Aeronautics Authority wrote a formal report on the
sightings, and numerous magazine writers studied them, the complete story
has never fully been told. The pros have been left out of the con accounts,
and the cons were neatly overlooked by the pro writers.

For a year after the twin sightings we were still putting little pieces in the
puzzle.

In some aspects the Washington National Sightings could be classed as a
surprise—we used this as an excuse when things got fouled up— but in
other ways they weren't. A few days prior to the incident a scientist, from an
agency that I can't name, and I were talking about the build-up of reports
along the east coast of the United States. We talked for about two hours, and
I was ready to leave when he said that he had one last comment to make—a
prediction. From his study of the UFO reports that he was getting from Air
Force Headquarters, and from discussions with his colleagues, he said that
he thought that we were sitting right on top of a big keg full of loaded
flying saucers. "Within the next few days," he told me, and I remember that
he punctuated his slow, deliberate remarks by hitting the desk with his fist,
"they're going to blow up and you're going to have the granddaddy of all
UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York," he
predicted, "probably Washington."

The trend in the UFO reports that this scientist based his prediction on
hadn't gone unnoticed. We on Project Blue Book had seen it, and so had the
people in the Pentagon; we all had talked about it.

On July 10 the crew of a National Airlines plane reported a light "too
bright to be a lighted balloon and too slow to be a big meteor" while they
were flying south at 2,000 feet near Quantico, Virginia, just south of
Washington.

On July 13 another airliner crew reported that when they were 60 miles
southwest of Washington, at 11,000 feet, they saw a light below them. It
came up to their level, hovered off to the left for several minutes, and then it
took off in a fast, steep climb when the pilot turned on his landing lights.

On July 14 the crew of a Pan American airliner en route from New York
to Miami reported eight UFO's near Newport News, Virginia, about 130
miles south of Washington.

Two nights later there was another sighting in exactly the same area but
from the ground. At 9:00P.M. a high-ranking civilian scientist from the
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Laboratory at Langley AFB
and another man were standing near the ocean looking south over Hampton
Roads when they saw two amber-colored lights, "much too large to be
aircraft lights," off to their right, silently traveling north. Just before the two
lights got abreast of the two men they made a 180-degree turn and started
back toward the spot where they had first been seen. As they turned, the two
lights seemed to "jockey for position in the formation." About this time a
third light came out of the west and joined the first two; then as the three
UFO's climbed out of the area toward the south, several more lights joined
the formation. The entire episode had lasted only three minutes.

The only possible solution to the sighting was that the two men had seen
airplanes. We investigated this report and found that there were several B-
26's from Langley AFB in the area at the time of the sighting, but none of
the B-26 pilots remembered being over Hampton Roads. In fact, all of them
had generally stayed well south of Norfolk until about 10:30P.M. because of
thunderstorm activity northwest of Langley. Then there were other factors
—the observers heard no sound and they were away from all city noises,
aircraft don't carry just one or two amber lights, and the distance between
the two lights was such that had they been on an airplane the airplane would
have been huge or very close to the observers. And last, but not least, the
man from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a very
famous aerodynamicist and of such professional stature that if he said the
lights weren't airplanes they weren't.

This then was the big build-up to the first Washington national sighting
and the reason why my friend predicted that the Air Force was sitting on a
big powder keg of loaded flying saucers.

When the keg blew the best laid schemes of the mice and men at ATIC,
they went the way best laid schemes are supposed to. The first one of the
highly publicized Washington national sightings started, according to the
CAA's logbook at the airport, at 11:40P.M. on the night of July 19 when
two radars at National Airport picked up eight unidentified targets east and
south of Andrews AFB. The targets weren't airplanes because they would
loaf along at 100 to 130 miles an hour then suddenly accelerate to
"fantastically high speeds" and leave the area. During the night the crews of
several airliners saw mysterious lights in the same locations that the radars
showed the targets; tower operators also saw lights, and jet fighters were
brought in.

But nobody bothered to tell Air Force Intelligence about the sighting.
When reporters began to call intelligence and ask about the big sighting
behind the headlines, INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS
OVER WASHINGTON, D.C., they were told that no one had ever heard of
such a sighting. In the next edition the headlines were supplemented by,
AIR FORCE WONT TALK.

Thus intelligence was notified about the first Washington national
sighting.

I heard about the sighting about ten o'clock Monday morning when
Colonel Donald Bower and I got off an airliner from Dayton and I bought a
newspaper in the lobby of the Washington National Airport Terminal
Building. I called the Pentagon from the airport and talked to Major Dewey
Fournet, but all he knew was what he'd read in the papers. He told me that
he had called the intelligence officer at Bolling AFB and that he was
making an investigation. We would get a preliminary official report by
noon.

It was about 1:00P.M. when Major Fournet called me and said that the
intelligence officer from Bolling was in his office with the preliminary
report on the sightings. I found Colonel Bower, we went up to Major
Fournet's office and listened to the intelligence officer's briefing.

The officer started by telling us about the location of the radars involved
in the incident. Washington National Airport, which is located about three
miles south of the heart of the city, had two radars. One was a long-range
radar in the Air Route Traffic Control section. This radar had 100-mile
range and was used to control all air traffic approaching Washington. It was
known as the ARTC radar. The control tower at National Airport had a
shorter-range radar that it used to control aircraft in the immediate vicinity
of the airport. Bolling AFB, he said, was located just east of National

Airport, across the Potomac River. Ten miles farther east, in almost a direct
line with National and Bolling, was Andrews AFB. It also had a short-
range radar. All of these airfields were linked together by an intercom
system.

Then the intelligence officer went on to tell about the sighting.

When a new shift took over at the ARTC radar room at National Airport,
the air traffic was light so only one man was watching the radarscope. The
senior traffic controller and the six other traffic controllers on the shift were
out of the room at eleven-forty, when the man watching the radarscope
noticed a group of seven targets appear. From their position on the scope he
knew that they were just east and a little south of Andrews AFB. In a way
the targets looked like a formation of slow airplanes, but no formations
were due in the area. As he watched, the targets loafed along at 100 to 130
miles an hour; then in an apparent sudden burst of speed two of them
streaked out of radar range. These were no airplanes, the man thought, so he
let out a yell for the senior controller. The senior controller took one look at
the scope and called in two more of the men. They all agreed that these
were no airplanes. The targets could be caused by a malfunction in the
radar, they thought, so a technician was called in —the set was in perfect
working order.

The senior controller then called the control tower at National Airport;
they reported that they also had unidentified targets on their scopes, so did
Andrews. And both of the other radars reported the same slow speeds
followed by a sudden burst of speed. One target was clocked at 7,000 miles
an hour. By now the targets had moved into every sector of the scope and
had flown through the prohibited flying areas over the White House and the
Capitol.

Several times during the night the targets passed close to commercial
airliners in the area and on two occasions the pilots of the airliners saw
lights that they couldn't identify, and the lights were in the same spots
where the radar showed UFO's to be. Other pilots to whom the ARTC radar
men talked on the radio didn't see anything odd, at least that's what they
said, but the senior controller knew airline pilots and knew that they were
very reluctant to report UFO's.

The first sighting of a light by an airline pilot took place shortly after
midnight, when an ARTC controller called the pilot of a Capital Airlines
flight just taking off from National. The controller asked the pilot to keep
watch for unusual lights—or anything. Soon after the pilot cleared the
traffic pattern, and while ARTC was still in contact with him, he suddenly
yelled, "There's one—off to the right— and there it goes." The controller
had been watching the scope, and a target that had been off to the right of
the Capitaliner was gone.

During the next fourteen minutes this pilot reported six more identical
lights.

About two hours later another pilot, approaching National Airport from
the south, excitedly called the control tower to report that a light was
following him at "eight o'clock level." The tower checked their radar-scope
and there was a target behind and to the left of the airliner. The ARTC radar
also had the airliner and the UFO target. The UFO tagged along behind and
to the left of the airliner until it was within four miles of touchdown on the
runway. When the pilot reported the light was leaving, the two radarscopes
showed that the target was pulling away from the airliner.

Once during the night all three radars, the two at Washington and the one
at Andrews AFB, picked up a target three miles north of the Riverdale
Radio beacon, north of Washington. For thirty seconds the three radar

operators compared notes about the target over the intercom, then suddenly
the target was gone—and it left all three radarscopes simultaneously.

But the clincher came in the wee hours of the morning, when an ARTC
traffic controller called the control tower at Andrews AFB and told the
tower operators that ARTC had a target just south of their tower, directly
over the Andrews Radio range station. The tower operators looked and there
was a "huge fiery-orange sphere" hovering in the sky directly over their
range station.

Not too long after this excitement had started, in fact just after the
technician had checked the radar and found that the targets weren't caused
by a radar malfunction, ARTC had called for Air Force interceptors to come
in and look around. But they didn't show, and finally ARTC called again—
then again. Finally, just about daylight, an F-94 arrived, but by that time the
targets were gone. The F-94 crew searched the area for a few minutes but
they couldn't find anything unusual so they returned to their base.

So ended phase one of the Washington National Sightings.

The Bolling AFB intelligence officer said he would write up the complete
report and forward it to ATIC.

That afternoon things bustled in the Pentagon. Down on the first floor Al
Chop was doing his best to stave off the press while up on the fourth floor
intelligence officers were holding some serious conferences. There was talk
of temperature inversions and the false targets they could cause; but the
consensus was that a good radar operator could spot inversion-caused
targets, and the traffic controllers who operated the radar at Washington
National Airport weren't just out of radar school. Every day the lives of
thousands of people depended upon their interpretation of the radar targets
they saw on their scopes. And you don't get a job like this unless you've

spent a good many years watching a luminous line paint targets on a good
many radarscopes. Targets caused by inversions aren't rare—in the years
that these men had been working with radar they had undoubtedly seen
every kind of target, real or false, that radar can detect. They had told the
Bolling AFB intelligence officer that the targets they saw were caused by
the radar waves' bouncing off a hard, solid object. The Air Force radar
operator at Andrews backed them up; so did two veteran airline pilots who
saw lights right where the radar showed a UFO to be.

Then on top of all this there were the reports from the Washington area
during the previous two weeks—all good—all from airline pilots or equally
reliable people.

To say the least, the sighting at Washington National was a jolt.

Besides trying to figure out what the Washington National UFO's were,
we had the problem of what to tell the press. They were now beginning to
put on a squeeze by threatening to call a congressman— and nothing chills
blood faster in the military. They wanted some kind of an official statement
and they wanted it soon. Some people in intelligence wanted to say just,
"We don't know," but others held out for a more thorough investigation. I
happened to be in this latter category. Many times in the past I had seen
what first seemed to be a good UFO report completely fall apart under a
thorough investigation. I was for stalling the press and working all night if
necessary to go into every aspect of the sighting. But to go along with the
theme of the Washington National Sightings—confusion—there was a lot of
talk but no action and the afternoon passed with no further investigation.

Finally about 4:00P.M. it was decided that the press, who still wanted an
official comment, would get an official "No comment" and that I would stay
in Washington and make a more detailed investigation.

I called Lieutenant Andy Flues, who was in charge of Project Blue Book
while I was gone, to tell him that I was staying over and I found out that
they were in a de luxe flap back in Dayton. Reports were pouring out of the
teletype machines at the rate of thirty a day and many were as good, if not
better, than the Washington incident. I talked this over with Colonel Bower
and we decided that even though things were popping back at ATIC the
Washington sighting, from the standpoint of national interest, was more
important.

Feeling like a national martyr because I planned to work all night if
necessary, I laid the course of my investigation. I would go to Washington
National Airport, Andrews AFB, airlines offices, the weather bureau, and a
half dozen other places scattered all over the capital city. I called the
transportation section at the Pentagon to get a staff car but it took me only
seconds to find out that the regulations said no staff cars except for senior
colonels or generals. Colonel Bower tried—same thing. General Samford
and General Garland were gone, so I couldn't get them to try to pressure a
staff car out of the hillbilly who was dispatching vehicles. I went down to
the finance office—could I rent a car and charge it as travel expense? No—
city buses are available. But I didn't know the bus system and it would take
me hours to get to all the places I had to visit, I pleaded. You can take a cab
if you want to pay for it out of your per diem was the answer. Nine dollars a
day per diem and I should pay for a hotel room, meals, and taxi fares all
over the District of Columbia. Besides, the lady in finance told me, my
travel orders to Washington covered only a visit to the Pentagon. In
addition, she said, I was supposed to be on my way back to Dayton right
now, and if I didn't go through all the red tape of getting the orders amended
I couldn't collect any per diem and technically I'd be AWOL. I couldn't talk
to the finance officer, the lady informed me, because he always left at 4:30
to avoid the traffic and it was now exactly five o'clock and she was quitting.

At five-one I decided that if saucers were buzzing Pennsylvania
Avenue in formation I couldn't care less. I called Colonel Bower,
explained my troubles, and said that I was through. He concurred, and
I caught the next airliner to Dayton.

When I returned I dropped in to see Captain Roy James in the radar
branch and told him about the sighting. He said that he thought it sounded
as if the radar targets had been caused by weather but since he didn't have
the finer details he naturally couldn't make any definite evaluation.

The good UFO reports that Lieutenant Flues had told me about when I
called him from Washington had tripled in number before I got around to
looking at them. Our daily take had risen to forty a day, and about a third of
them were classified as unknowns.

More amber-red fights like those seen on July 18 had been observed over
the Guided Missile Long-Range Proving Ground at Patrick AFB, Florida. In
Uvalde, Texas, a UFO described as "a large, round, silver object that spun
on its vertical axis" was seen to cross 100 degrees of afternoon sky in forty-
eight seconds. During part of its flight it passed between two towering
cumulus clouds. At Los Alamos and Holyoke, Massachusetts, jets had
chased UFO's. In both cases the UFO's had been lost as they turned into the
sun.

In two night encounters, one in New Jersey and one in Massachusetts, F-
94's tried unsuccessfully to intercept unidentified lights reported by the
Ground Observer Corps. In both cases the pilots of the radar- nosed jet
interceptors saw a light; they closed in and their radar operators got a lock-
on. But the lock-ons were broken in a few seconds, in both cases, as the
light apparently took violent evasive maneuvers.

Copies of these and other reports were going to the Pentagon, and I was
constantly on the phone or having teleconferences with Major Fournet.

When the second Washington National Sighting came along, almost a
week to the hour from the first one, by a stroke of luck things weren't too
fouled up. The method of reporting the sighting didn't exactly follow the
official reporting procedures that are set forth in Air Force Letter 200-5,
dated 5 April 1952, Subject: Reporting of Unidentified Flying Objects—but
it worked.

I first heard about the sighting about ten o'clock in the evening when I
received a telephone call from Bob Ginna, Life magazine's UFO expert. He
had gotten the word from Life's Washington News Bureau and wanted a
statement about what the Air Force planned to do. I decided that instead of
giving a mysterious "no comment" I would tell the truth: "I have no idea
what the Air Force is doing; in all probability it's doing nothing." When he
hung up, I called the intelligence duty officer in the Pentagon and I was
correct, intelligence hadn't heard about the sighting. I asked the duty officer
to call Major Fournet and ask him if he would go out to the airport, which
was only two or three miles from his home. When he got the call from the
duty officer Major Fournet called Lieutenant Holcomb; they drove to the
ARTC radar room at National Airport and found Al Chop already there. So
at this performance the UFO's had an official audience; Al Chop, Major
Dewey Fournet, and Lieutenant Holcomb, a Navy electronics specialist
assigned to the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence, all saw the radar
targets and heard the radio conversations as jets tried to intercept the UFO's.

Being in Dayton, 380 miles away, there wasn't much that I could do, but I
did call Captain Roy James thinking possibly he might want to talk on the
phone to the people who were watching the UFO's on the radarscopes. But

Captain James has a powerful dislike for UFO's— especially on Saturday
night.

About five o'clock Sunday morning Major Fournet called and told me the
story of the second sighting at Washington National Airport:

About 10:30P.M. on July 26 the same radar operators who had seen the
UFO's the week before picked up several of the same slow-moving targets.
This time the mysterious craft, if that is what they were, were spread out in
an arc around Washington from Herndon, Virginia, to Andrews AFB. This
time there was no hesitation in following the targets. The minute they
appeared on the big 24-inch radarscope one of the controllers placed a
plastic marker representing an unidentified target near each blip on the
scope. When all the targets had been carefully marked, one of the
controllers called the tower and the radar station at Andrews AFB—they
also had the unknown targets.

By 11:30P.M. four or five of the targets were continually being tracked at
all times, so once again a call went out for jet interceptors. Once again there
was some delay, but by midnight two F- 94's from New Castle County AFB
were airborne and headed south. The reporters and photographers were
asked to leave the radar room on the pretext that classified radio frequencies
and procedures were being used in vectoring the interceptors. All civilian
air traffic was cleared out of the area and the jets moved in.

When I later found out that the press had been dismissed on the grounds
that the procedures used in an intercept were classified, I knew that this was
absurd because any ham radio operator worth his salt could build equipment
and listen in on any intercept. The real reason for the press dismissal, I
learned, was that not a few people in the radar room were positive that this
night would be the big night in UFO history—the night when a pilot would

close in on and get a good look at a UFO—and they didn't want the press to
be in on it.

But just as the two '94's arrived in the area the targets disappeared from
the radarscopes. The two jets were vectored into the areas where the radar
had shown the last target plots, but even though the visibility was excellent
they could see nothing. The two airplanes stayed around a few minutes
more, made a systematic search of the area, but since they still couldn't see
anything or pick up anything on their radars they returned to their base.

A few minutes after the F-94's left the Washington area, the unidentified
targets were back on the radarscopes in that same area.

What neither Major Fournet nor I knew at this time was that a few
minutes after the targets left the radarscopes in Washington people in the
area around Langley AFB near Newport News, Virginia, began to call
Langley Tower to report that they were looking at weird bright lights that
were "rotating and giving off alternating colors." A few minutes after the
calls began to come in, the tower operators themselves saw the same or a
similar light and they called for an interceptor.

An F-94 in the area was contacted and visually vectored to the light by
the tower operators. The F-94 saw the light and started toward it, but
suddenly it went out, "like somebody turning off a light bulb." The F-94
crew continued their run and soon got a radar lock-on, but it was broken in
a few seconds as the target apparently sped away. The fighter stayed in the
area for several more minutes and got two more lock-ons, only to have
them also broken after a few seconds.

A few minutes after the F-94 over Newport News had the last lock-on
broken, the targets came back on the scopes at Washington National.