In 1947, some unexplained objects flashing across Kentucky night skies were photographed by a Louisville
newspaperman.
First, whatever the pictures show, they are not the lights seen by the professors. They
looked at the pictures and said so. Their first two sightings were roughly crescent, the rest showed no
geometric pattern – V-shaped or otherwise. None of the independent sightings was V-shaped either. The
pictures, however, are as precise in formation as a double row of Radio City Rockettes.
Second, the pictures were taken on a clear night, with plenty of stars. No stars show in the
pictures. This means that the lights were much brighter than the stars – and in Texas, the stars at
night are big and bright. Neither the professors nor the other observers described their lights as big
and bright. Theirs were dull and glowing.
Third, with much of the town scanning the sky, no one else in Lubbock reported the lights on August
30, when the photographer saw his three bright, spectacularly geometric flights. Fourth, we
reconstructed the scene later at Dayton, attempted to duplicate the pictures, and failed. The
photographer had showed me the site in his backyard. Because of trees and other obstructions, it
afforded a span of 120 degrees of clear sky. I questioned him about the speed at which the lights
crossed the sky. He estimated it at 30 degrees a second – a figure that agreed with the earlier
estimates by the professors. To double check, I had him move his hand across the sky and checked him.
It was close to 30 degrees a second. This gave him four seconds in which to shoot each flight – two
pictures one time, three the next.
The Kodak 35 has a hand wind to feed fresh film into place. At Dayton we simulated 120 degrees of
open sky with lights traveling 30 degrees a second, took a Kodak 35, and tried to shoot and wind until
we had three shots. We couldn't do it. We tried over and over with different people. The best anyone
could squeeze in was two badly hurried shots. And with the shutter at 1/10th of a second the two shots
were badly blurred.
In poking around Lubbock, I talked to many people who had seen the lights and were sure that they
were birds. One old gentleman had seen the lights several nights. His description matched that of the
professors.
"Shucks, officer,
" he drawled. "Them things is plovers.
"
I went off to read up on plovers. They're water birds about the size of quail with light breasts that
could reflect light. A local game warden told me there were plovers in the vicinity.
A few blocks from the area where most of the sightings had been made was a boulevard lighted by
mercury vapor lights that gave off an intense bluish-white glare. Then I recalled an odd bit of
information. When the professors had tried to set up a second observation post elsewhere, they saw
nothing, while the sightings continued at the original spot – near the lighted boulevard.
Four times in the following year, at Fargo, N.D., Greenville, S.C., Randolph Air Force Base, and
Bakersfield, Calif., we got cases that duplicated the Lubbock affair. Each time they proved to be
birds reflecting ground lights.
The project files carry the Lubbock lights as "unknown." The pictures were never proved to be a hoax.
Maybe, under intense excitement, one man in a thousand can shoot three unblurred shots with a handheld
Kodak 35 in four seconds. I'll believe it when I see it done.
But so far as what the professors saw, I think that 10-gauge shotgun would have brought down the
Lubbock saucers in a shower of feathers.
While I was in Lubbock, a temporary investigator, Lt. Henry Metscher, had made some sense out of the
Jersey mystery that had lured me into saucer chasing. Among the data that Cummings had brought back on
the "faster-than-a-jet" radar objects were some plots on locations and times. It turned out that the
objects that had outsped the automatic tracking and startled the VIPs actually plotted out at an
unspectacular 400 mph. On questioning, the operator conceded that he had got excited because of the
visiting brass. The object undoubtedly was a conventional plane.
The "disk" spotted over Sandy Hook by the jet? Merscher learned that a large balloon painted silver
for radar tracking had been launched near Sandy Hook just before the pilot and the AF major saw their
UFO. What about the maneuvering? Hang on to that question for a bit.
The excited call the next morning from headquarters? Another balloon carrying a radar target. The HQ
officers had a bet on about its altitude, wanted a fast report, didn't bother to tell the radar crew
the reason for the urgency. By this time the radar boys had the saucer fever and were ready to see
anything. The second supersonic object proved to be a weather blip. The last saucer that hung
ominously over New Jersey was definitely tabbed as another balloon.
I congratulated Metscher and settled down to the business of knocking off saucers like an ace skeet
shooter. If the saucers can laugh (we had several that whistled), they probably zipped through the
stratosphere chuckling to themselves.
One of the many things I did was go back over the files of the project from its inception. There were
some odd facts and some baffling sightings. One thing I learned was that Arnold wasn't the Columbus of
the flying saucer at all. The project had thirteen listings prior to June 24, 1947 – the supposed dawn
of the Saucer Era. They all had come into the project after Arnold told his story, with the usual
explanation that the observers had been reluctant to tell their tales until Arnold had broken the
ice.
Among the post Arnold sightings were three classics – the tragedy in which Capt. Thomas Mantell was
killed, the dogfight between an F-51 and a light at Fargo, N.D., and the sighting of a "space ship
with lighted windows" by an airliner near Montgomery, Ala.
The Mantell case was headlined
across the nation as "Flier Killed Chasing Saucer
." His tragedy is interwoven with saucerian
folklore, and frequently is told in conjunction with a local story of a plane that takes off after a
"thing" in the sky and is never seen again. I have heard local variants of this story perhaps twenty
times. Each time the account starts out: "You remember when Mantell was shot down by a saucer?
Listen to what happened here last month....
"
On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, two airmen in the control tower at Godman AFB, near Louisville,
Ky., began getting calls about an unidentified object spotted by civilians in the area. They checked
with Flight Service about experimental craft, were told that none was in the vicinity. Shortly later,
one of them spotted an object from the tower, pointed it out to his companion. They summoned their
officers, who also saw something.
At this point, four F-51's of the Kentucky National Guard approached the base. Mantell, the flight
leader, was asked to check on the object and try to identify it. One of his planes had to land because
of fuel shortage. Mantell and the other two took out after the thing in the sky.
The Air Force account of the case was monumentally fouled up. It had all three fliers describing the
object as "metallic and of tremendous size," and told how Mantell climbed away from his mates,
radioing reports back to the tower until he suddenly fell silent. Some time later his body was found
with the wreckage of his plane scattered over a wide area. The account then reports that the first
analysis of the case indicated that he was chasing the planet Venus.
The obvious public reaction to this account was: "Who do they think they are kidding?
" If
three fliers agreed that the thing was "metallic
" and "tremendous
" how could it have
been the planet Venus? Later in the project, we had many instances of pilots mistaking Venus (and
other planets) for something flying through the sky. None of them ever described it as
"tremendous.
"
In examining the original reports on the tragedy, I learned the following:
- The two men in the Godman Tower were joined by five officers while the chase was in progress.
None of the seven men agreed on their description of the thing in the sky. One called it an "
ice
cream cone tipped with red,
" a description that was picked up in the Air Force release as
agreed upon by all the observers. Actually, the other descriptions varied greatly: "round and
white,
" "huge and silver or metallic,
" "small white object,
" "one-fourth the
size of the full moon,
" "one-tenth the size of the full moon.
"
- One wingman never saw the thing at all. He radioed: "
What the hell are we looking for?
"
When the other landed, he described it as "resembling a reflection in the canopy.
"
- There was almost no agreement among the seven men listening on the tower squawk box as to what
Mantell actually said. Only one said he heard Mantell call the UFO "
metallic and of tremendous
size.
"
The project learned later that there was a huge skyhook balloon in the vicinity. It was spotted later
southwest of Louisville by two observers with telescopes, and was identified as a balloon. Such
identification should have plucked the planet Venus out of the Air Force speculation.
Why should an experienced pilot like Mantell chase a balloon? The skyhooks were new at that time so
he may not have known about them. To him a balloon was one of the small weather models frequently
launched from air fields.
What happened to his plane? Why was the wreckage scattered over such a wide area if it was not blown
to bits by a hostile saucer?
The wreckage showed that the plane was trimmed to climb. Mantell had no oxygen aboard, and he was
near 20,000 feet – almost four miles up – when his wingmen abandoned the climb. It is likely that he
blacked out from lack of oxygen. At some higher altitude, the plane's power would drop off and the
F-51 level out with an unconscious man at the controls. The propeller torque would pull it in to a
slow left turn, into a shallow dive, then an increasingly steeper descent under power. Somewhere
during the screaming dive, the plane reached excessive speed and began to break up in the air....
Classic No. Two – the "dogfight between the plane and the saucer." It is listed as the lone case of
"combat" between a plane and a saucer. Actually there were three other such cases.
The pilot was George F. Gorman, a 25-year-old second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National
Guard. On October 1, 1948, starting at 9 p.m., he chased an apparently disembodied light for 27
minutes in his fast F-51. He described the UFO as "a small ball of clear white light, between six
and eight inches in diameter.
" For awhile it winked on and off, then it appeared to put on power
and glowed steadily. Gorman pushed his F-51 to the limit and was unable to catch it. He reported that
it made one turn that he couldn't follow and twice came at him in what appeared to be ramming attacks.
Both times he dived his plane out of the collision course. The "dogfight" ranged from low level up to
17,000 feet, and the light finally pulled straight up and disappeared.
"I had the distinct impression that its maneuvers were controlled by thought or reason,
"
Gorman said.
Four other observers at Fargo partially corroborated the story. An oculist, Dr. A.D. Cannon was near
the field in his plane with a 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.
Here are the other dogfight cases:
On June 21, 1952, at 10:58 p.m., a Ground Observer Spotter reported that a slow-moving craft was
nearing one of our atomic energy installations. An F-47 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 what seemed to be ramming attacks. The light was described as white, 6 to 8 inches in diameter,
blinking until it put on power. The pilot could see no silhouette of anything attached to it. The
similarity to the Fargo case is striking.
On the night of Dec. 10, 1952, near another atomic installation, the pilot and radar observer of a
patrolling F-91 spotted a light while flying at 26,000 feet. They checked 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 drop away.
Several times the plane altered course itself because collision was imminent. There was a solid
undercast of clouds, which would eliminate the possibility of refraction of ground lights.
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. It had a sequel that revealed some fascinating information about the illusions the supposedly
objective human eye can contrive.
"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 SNB and had a greenish tail that looked to be five to six times as long
as the light's diameter. The tail was seen several times in the next 10 minutes in periods from 5 to
30 seconds each. As I reached 10,000 feet it appeared to be 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 crew men, 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."
When he landed, anyone who would have tried to tell him he was chasing a lighted weather balloon
would have had a rough time. Twenty-four hours later, he was convinced that he had chased a
balloon.
The following night, a lighted balloon was sent up and the pilot was ordered up to compare his
experiences. He duplicated his "dog fight" – illusions and all. The Navy furnished us with a long
analysis of the affair, explaining how the pilot had been fooled. It is recommended reading for anyone
who believes that an experienced pilot cannot be fooled by what he sees.
In each of the four cases of "dog fights," including Gorman's, a balloon was known to be in the
vicinity.
In the case involving the ground observer and the F-47 near the atomic installation, we plotted the
winds and calculated that a balloon was right at the spot where the pilot encountered the light.
In the other instance, with the "white object with two windows," we found that a skyhook balloon had
been plotted at the exact site of the "battle."
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.
The third saucer classic did not involve a saucer at all, but a "wingless aircraft, 100 feet long,
cigar-shaped and about twice the diameter of a B-29." It was sighted the night of July 24, 1948, near
Montgomery, Ala., by C.S. Chiles and J.B. Whitted, pilots of an Eastern Airlines plane. The underside
of the thing had a "deep blue glow," there were "two rows of windows from which bright lights were
glowing, and it had a 50-foot trail of orange-red flames!" Only one passenger of the flight was awake
at the time. He saw only "a trail of fire."
On the basis of later experience, the project was fairly sure that this was meteor. At about the same
time, a plane flying between Blackstone, Va., and Greensboro, S.C., reported independently that it had
see a "bright shooting star" in the direction of Montgomery.
On the night of November 24, 1951, there was a similar incident, with multiple sightings. It started
when a CAA tower in southern Michigan told the Air Force Flight Service that an airline crew had seen
a huge object with bluish-white flames going southwest at an extremely high speed. At about the same
time, other reports flooded in from Air Force personnel at Selfridge AFB, north of Detroit, from a
soldier on leave at Battle Creek, from another CAA tower, from some sheriff's deputies. All reported
the same sort of object going the same direction. Most of them described it as rocket-shaped. One, an
experienced pilot, was certain it was a V-2 type missile. All these observers – at scattered points –
reported the thing "about four miles east." It turned out to be a very large meteor passing over the
New England states; we verified it with experienced meteor observers and the time checked to the dot.
I talked to a number of the witnesses later and they remained firm in their belief that they had seen
a Something.
The science-fiction boys, of course, converted the Chiles-Whitted Something into another "mother
ship.
" It was in sight for only a few seconds, was seen by only three people, and then vanished
into the dark night. But it flies on endlessly in the pages of saucer lore, a transport from outer
space packed to the gunwales with flying disks.
It is popular folklore among the more fanatical saucer fans that the Air Force has either bungled or
deliberately sabotaged the saucer investigation. Our sterner critics imply that a saucer could land
within ten feet of a Project Blue Book man, and he would turn his back on it and walk away. Frank
Scully says, "It's high time that the Air Force stop fumbling with the saucer question and turn the
investigation over to a competent civilian group.
"
It is utter nonsense, of course, to charge that Blue Book doesn't want to verify the existence of
the saucers. If they come from outer space, the first man to lock down proof of it would go down in
history with a bigger name than Christopher Columbus. He'd be remembered when such minor figures as
U.S. Presidents were long forgotten. Every time a good sighting came into Blue Book, you could feel
the suppressed excitement run through the staff, an unspoken "Maybe this is it.
"
Here is what Blue Book did in its efforts to pin down the facts about the flying saucers. Virtually
all the evidence we had to work with was the reports of witnesses. Shortly after I took over the
project, we set about preparing a model questionnaire that would get the maximum amount of data from
the witnesses. If there was a pattern to the saucer stories, we wanted to find it.
The project had tried a variety of questionnaires in the past. We gathered all these together along
with a cross section of accounts by witnesses. We took this material to the psychology department of a
Midwest university that is noted for the excellence of its statistical questionnaires. We got together
a panel of engineers, physicists, mathematicians, astronomers and psychologists to list the questions
they would like to have answered. The project also listed the things it wanted to know. The
psychologists determined whether it was feasible to expect an eyewitness to answer each question and
if so, how it should be worded.
When we got through with all this, we used the result as a test model, and sent it out to several
hundred saucer-sighters. When the reports were returned, we revised the questionnaires again, from the
way it had worked out. The result is the standard questionnaire that Blue Book is using today.
The questionnaire ran eight pages and had 68 questions. It was booby-trapped in a couple of places to
give us a cross-check on the reliability of the reporter as a witness. We got quite a few
questionnaires answered in such a way that it was obvious that the signer was drawing on his
imagination.
From the standard questionnaire, the project worked up two more. One dealt with radar sightings of
UFOs, the other with sightings made from a plane.
At the instigation of Blue Book, the Air Force sent out orders to every one of its installations in
the world, instructing them on the reporting of "saucers." Immediate reports were to be made by wire
to ATIC, listing the basic data such as time, date, location, description of the object, names of
observers, etc. These initial reports were to be followed up with expanded written reports. Blue Book
was also given authority for direct communication with any installation in the U.S., thus cutting a
lot of red tape and speeding up the investigations.
This AF regulation, unfortunately, was issued on the same day that Life magazine came out with a
flying-saucer story that reversed its previous attitude and considered the question soberly. A lot of
people added two and two and got six. The story went around that Life was "softening up the public for
the truth" while the new Air Force regulation was "alerting the military." Actually, it was
coincidence.
We obtained the cooperation of astronomers all over the country. Scores of them were queried on
whether, in their constant watching of the skies through giant telescopes, they had ever seen anything
that resembled a space ship. The answer was no. There are also a number of stations across the U.S.
where automatic cameras photograph the sky at intervals every night the year around to help track
meteors. We asked these people if their cameras had ever caught anything that resembled a flying
saucer. The answer was no. Both the astronomers and the sky-photographers were asked to notify the
project if they ever turned up anything unusual. They never did.
We sent out special cameras to places where there had been a high number of sightings in an effort to
get pictures of our own. Each camera had two lenses, one of which had a diffraction grid to split
light into its component parts and thus give a clue to the source of the light – whether it was coming
from a jet's tail, a balloon, or what? We had a lot of trouble with the cameras, and got only five or
six pictures, all of which were worthless. The light-gathering power of the lenses was too low. The
cameras have been re-equipped, and the Air Force recently has redistributed them.
We did not rely solely on our own resources in trying to unravel the UFO riddle. In January 1952,
Col. Frank Dunn, then chief of ATIC, decided that we should hire several well-qualified scientists on
a consultant basis, to help us gather certain technical information, to review outstanding "unknowns,"
to go over our conclusions and to suggest future courses of action. The names of these people have
never been made public, and it is unlikely that they will be. The project learned early that
publication of anyone's name in connection with the saucer stories brought on a deluge of mail,
telephone calls and visits from cranks.
The invariable comment of scientists who examined the project's data was that they offered
insufficient solid information for evaluation. Several hundred people, of all different sorts, said
they had seen something that they couldn't explain, under a wide variety of circumstances. Where did
you go from there?
The new questionnaire and the Air Force order came at a fortunate time – just before the enormous
upsurge of sightings in 1952. By the end of the year we had a much better collection of data — both in
quantity and quality — and we decided to summon a
week-long conference of scientists to look it over and tell us what they thought.
They met early in 1953. Like our consultants, they cannot be named, and for the same reasons. But the
group consisted of some of the nation's top people in astrophysics, operational research,
intelligence, physics and psychology.
First we briefed them thoroughly on the operation of the project, on our methods of evaluation, on
our conclusions and how we arrived at them. When were through, they examined the "best" of the UFO
cases that the project had been unable to explain. They viewed movies, looked at still photographs of
"saucers," and heard reports from specialists on radar and photo-interpretation.
At the end of the week, they unanimously concluded that we had nothing that proved – or even
indicated – that any type of vehicle was violating U.S. air space. There was discussion that possibly
some new natural phenomenon was causing some sightings, but this was rated doubtful.
On the possibility of emissaries from outer space, they made this statement: "We as a group do not
believe it is impossible for some other celestial body to be inhabited by intelligent creatures. Nor
is it impossible that these creatures could have reached such a state of development that they could
visit earth. However, there is nothing in the so-called "flying saucer" reports that would even
vaguely indicate that this taking place.
"
This group viewed – and rejected as proof of the existence of saucers – the controversial Tremonton
movies.
These pictures were taken at 11:10 a.m., July 2, 1952, a few miles out of Tremonton, Utah, by Warrant
Officer Delbert Newhouse, a Navy photographer. He was driving in his car with his wife when they saw
some white objects circling in the blue sky. Newhouse took out his camera, a 16 mm. Bell and Howell,
and shot 40 feet of film. After he had the film developed, he sent it to Blue Book for analysis.
I've sat through ninety-seven showings of the film. When I first saw it, I was impressed by it – and
puzzled. It shows several groups of white spots orbiting against the blue Utah sky. There are no
points of reference – only the moving spots and the sky. Near the end of the film, one of the spots
moved away from the others, and Newhouse panned the camera along to follow it. When turned back, he
reported, the other spots had vanished.
I sent the film on to the Pentagon, where it was received by Maj. Dewey Fournet, liaison man for
ATIC. Fournet, an excellent engineer, holds strongly that saucers are real and come from outer space.
He has since left the service and is in private industry in Texas. He was tremendously excited with
the movies.
The movies were inspected by a group of high officers at the Pentagon and were sent back to Dayton
for analysis by the Air Force photo laboratory. The lab examined them and reported that there was no
evidence of fraud, and that the objects were not spherical balloons. It was the consensus of everyone
who viewed the movies, incidentally, that they were not a hoax, that they showed something that
Newhouse and his wife had seen. We decided to send them on to the Navy photo lab for further
evaluation. They were taken there by Fournet, and I understand that he gave them quite a buildup to
the Navy technicians.
The Navy subjected them to an intense analysis, involving thousands of man-hours of work, and came up
with an astounding report. The gist of their evaluation was that the movie was authentic, and that the
objects were not birds, balloons, planes, or anything earthly. They examined the film, frame by frame,
and analyzed the density of light on each object. They reported that the objects appeared to be
rotating in three groups, with each light increasing in brilliance, then decreasing, disappearing and
returning as if spinning about an axis.
On the panel of scientists that inspected them later were some men with excellent reputations in the
field of astronomical photo analysis. They viewed the movie a number of times, and questioned the Navy
analysts closely about their methods of evaluation. They concluded that the Navy's method of measuring
light density had been faulty, and the conclusions drawn from it were therefore unsound. They
suggested that the whole study be redone by new methods before the analysis be released.
Among the panel were a number of people who were convinced that the objects were sea gulls soaring on
a thermal current. This theory also has been advanced by other persons familiar with gulls, who had
seen the movie earlier. The ultimate decision of the experts was that the movie did not warrant the
great time and expense of second analysis.
At the time I was doubtful of the gull explanation. But later, while in San Francisco on an
investigation, I saw a group of gulls soaring on a bright day over the bay. I was astounded by the
similarity between the sight before my eyes and the movie that I had seen almost 100 times.
The project received three other movies that got considerable attention. One, in color, was taken at
Great Falls, Mont., and showed two bright spots of light speeding across the sky and passing behind a
water tower. Two F-94's were in the area, and the lights could have been reflections of the sun on
these jets, but we were not able to come to any definite conclusion.
The other two movies were made at White Sands Proving Grounds with Askania Cine theodolites –
scientific tracking cameras for following guided missiles. The first was made on April 27, 1950.
Shortly after a missile was fired and had soared into the stratosphere and fallen, someone spotted an
object in the sky. The theodolites were hooked up by an intercom system, and several stations were
instructed to try to get pictures. Unfortunately, only one camera had film. The pictures showed a
smudgy, dark object, not very well defined. It was moving.
On May 29, 1950, after word of the first picture had got around and the stations were more alert,
another object was sighted just before a missile was to be fired. A second station was called, and
they reported that they also could see the object visually. Both stations swung into action and took
photos. On developing the film, it turned out that each was tracking a different object – bright dots
of light – and again we had no triangulation. Whatever the dots were, they were impossible to
evaluate.
As a result of these incidents, the Air Force set up "Project Twinkle," two Askanias to be manned 24
hours a day. The project was operated for a year and didn't get a picture. It was first set up in an
area where there had been many "saucer" sightings, but as soon as it was in operation, the sightings
stopped and we began to get a flock of sightings from another area about 100 miles away. After months
of inaction, the Askanias were moved to that spot, whereupon the sightings stopped there and resumed
at the original site.
When I told this story to a dedicated saucer fan later, he had an immediate explanation. "Of
course,
" he said, "the saucers were watching you guys.
"
We were always on the lookout for "hardware" – any sort of tangible object that conceivably might
have dropped, been wrenched or stolen from a saucer. We got a variety of things that people said had
fallen from the sky and we had them all analyzed. Among them were some slag from Virginia, an aluminum
mop handle from Washington, D.C., and a tar-covered marble from Illinois.
Once a Texan reported that something had flashed across the sky and plunged through the ice into a
pond on his farm. Investigators went out with hollow tubes and probed into the ooze under the jagged
hole in the ice. They sent me one sample of the cross section from their pipes that puzzled them. It
turned out to be cow manure.
We naturally tended to give more credence to sightings from a group of witnesses than from a single
observer. One person can have spots before his eyes or hallucinations, but they won't be seen by a
friend. This elementary rule-of-thumb resulted in one saucer-sighter risking his happy home in an
effort to convince us.
We got a report, from a town that is going to remain nameless, that a citizen was sitting in his car
when it was buzzed by a flying saucer. We wrote back to the intelligence officer to whom the report
was made and asked him if there was any corroboration, pointing out that an unsupported story was – an
unsupported story.
"Look, mister,
" the citizen told the officer, "I'm not the only one who saw it. There was
a woman with me, and she saw it too. The trouble is, she wasn't my wife.
" This was the lone case
that we received of a saucer flying down Lovers' Lane.
Because of a run of saucer incidents that turned out to be balloons, we attempted to set up a system
that would give us information on every balloon in the country. The complex project yielded some
results, but explained only a small percentage of the unknowns.
We got flying-saucer reports from a weird assortment of origins – an oil drum exploding in a city
dump, paper plates caught in an updraft, bugs silhouetted against the sun. Birds flying over a
well-lighted area, like an athletic field at night, caused a lot of reports of "glowing
objects.
"
We were always being collared by volunteer experts. Each non-believer always had some revolutionary
theory that would explain away every saucer in the country. Invariably it was something that fifty
people had thought about years before. For some reason or other, there were a lot of military generals
who "knew what the saucers are.
" They would tell us that each sighting was just a reflection on
a plane's canopy, and then go into long stories about their own experiences with canopy reflections.
Whenever we were badly outranked we would listen carefully and try to nod at the proper time.
About the fifteenth time that an earnest member of the brass started unveiling the canopy reflection
theory, I rebelled.
"Look, sir,
" I said, "what about the thousands of sightings on the ground by people who
don't have canopies?
"
"Hmmm," mused the two-star theorist, "I never thought of that."
The variety of the UFOs, the many different circumstances under which they were sighted – in bright
sunlight, at dusk, at night, from planes, from the ground, by radar, by groups of people – should have
ruled out any attempts to explain them away by a single theory. But people kept trying.
Professor Donald H. Menzel, in a book entitled Flying Saucers –
History, Myth, Facts, attempted a single explanation for the stubborn 20 percent of unknowns that
the project could not account for. His theory was that "this mysterious residue consists of the rags
and tags of meteorological optics, mirages, reflections in mist, refraction and reflections of ice
crystals."
His explanation failed to account for the many cases where there was a simultaneous radar fix on a
UFO and a visual sighting. Mirages and reflections can and do fool the naked eye, but they don't show
up simultaneously on a radar scope.
On the one batch of spectacular UFOs that looked as if they ought to have a meteorological
explanation, the explanation collapsed. These were the flock of green fireballs that appeared in the
Southwest.
They caused considerable concern because they showed up in sizable numbers around the Atomic Energy
Commission's vital installations at Los Alamos and Sandia. They all showed the same characteristics
and were seen by hundreds of people, including a lot of top-flight government technicians and
scientists.
They were large, often described as big as the full moon, only brighter, and kelly-green in color.
They traveled at terrific speeds at apparently low altitudes. One airline pilot flying west of
Albuquerque swerved his plane, nearly throwing the passengers out of their seats, in his fear that he
was going to collide with one. They began appearing in December 1948, and had their biggest night on
December 5, when crews of both civilians and military aircraft and ground observers sighted them. They
appeared sporadically afterward, and then vanished. I talked to many people who had seen the fire
balls, and they have been an impressive sight.
The obvious initial theory was that they were meteors, and that they had shown up in one section of
the country by a fluke of the law of probability.
Dr. Lincoln La Paz, director of the Institute of Meteoretics at
University of New Mexico, strongly opposed this theory. He is one of the world's leading authorities
on meteorites – and he had seen the green fireballs. I had a long talk with him in July 1952, and he
had some convincing reasons.
- The color was wrong. Although there are green meteors, the color described by hundreds of people
was too bright a shade of green.
- Meteorites as low and as bright as the green fireballs would be as noisy as jet bombers. The
strange fireballs were silent.
- The fireballs did not follow the trajectory of a meteor, which arcs down under the pull of
gravity. They flew in a straight line from horizon to horizon.
- Dr. LaPaz was never able to locate any fragments of the green fireballs. He has long experience
in plotting the paths of meteorites, determining where they explode and finding fragments. And
witnesses did not report the fireballs as exploding.
I heard many reports that the copper content of the air in the New Mexico area showed a marked
increase during the invasion of the weird green balls of fire. This was reported flatly as fact by a
national magazine. We tried diligently, but were unable to authenticate this story.
On the green orbs, the project draw a blank, and the visitors to the Southwest remain a big question
mark in the Blue Book files. But whatever the emerald mysteries were, they were a separate puzzle from
the classic flying saucers. They had no characteristics in common with the silvery disks except they
flew.
As our experience in investigation broadened, we found that the reliability of saucer reports varied
inversely with the detail that the observer reported. The hoaxes were almost always marked by a vivid
description. When a witness could tell us exactly how many rivets the saucer had, we started checking
his background.
One morning when we arrived at work we found an urgent telegram from a Military Air Transport Service
base in Florida. It told about a scoutmaster
who had been attacked by a saucer and burned. The incident had been witnessed by three scouts,
and the local intelligence officer had made a quick check on the story and could find no holes in it.
He reported that the scoutmaster had a good reputation for reliability, which of course is what you'd
expect.
I showed the report to my superior at ATIC, Col.
Frank Dunn, and he approved an on-the-scene investigation. In 20 minutes we had a B-25 ready with two
pilots. I threw some things in a bag, got Lt. Robert Olssen, a Blue Book investigator, and we headed
for Florida. Just before we left, we called Florida and asked them to have a doctor examine the
scoutmaster's burns.
We landed late in the afternoon and reviewed the case with the local intelligence officer. He was
pretty well sold on the man's story. It was an exceptionally detailed account, and when I heard the
whole thing, I smelled a hoax. He said that he had conducted a scout meeting in the basement of a
church, and at the end of the meeting, started to drive four of the boys home. He dropped off one, and
then headed into the nearby town where the other three lived. He took a back road that led through a
sparsely settled area. This struck me as odd, but I checked the map and found that it was the logical
route from the first scout's house to the town where they were going.
By this time, his story went, it was around 9 p.m. As they drove through a sandy section with scrub
pine, he saw some lights come down low into the trees and disappear. The scoutmaster's first thought
was that a plane had made a crash landing. The boys didn't see the lights, but he told them about them
and said he thought he ought to investigate. The boys were afraid to be left alone in the car, and he
started to drive on when he peered back into the trees and saw something glowing. This time the boys
thought they saw it too. The scoutmaster decided that it was his duty to see if a plane was in
trouble.
He had the radio on in his car, and a quarter-hour program was just starting. He told the boys to
wait until the program was over, and if he hadn't returned, they were to go to a farmhouse a short way
down the road and summon help. Taking a flashlight and a machete, he headed into the woods.
He stumbled through the night, keeping his light on the ground, until he came to a clearing a short
distance from the road.
"I suddenly noticed something odd that frightened me," he said. "I felt damp, muggy heat on my face.
It did not feel natural. At the same time I smelled a faintly pungent odor.
"I stepped into the clearing and the heat and odor got worse. It felt like radiation from a furnace.
I glanced up to check the position of the North Star. It was a clear night and I had spotted the star
when I left the auto, to orient myself. The whole sky was black.
"I was paralyzed with fear and turned my flashlight up. The beam shone on the bottom of something.
It looked like battleship-gray linoleum. Whatever it was, it was so low I could have jumped up and hit
it with a machete.
"I backed up until I could see the stars again. Then I flashed the light up again and could see the
object plainly. It was about 50 feet in diameter, with things on the side like ventilators. The device
was dome-shaped, with a slightly convex bottom. As I stepped back, the heat diminished and I could
feel the cool, fresh air on the back of my neck.
"Suddenly I had the strange feeling that something was watching me. From the saucer there came the
sound of something moving, of metal against metal, like a safe door opening.
"A glowing red ball appeared and started to float down toward me. In a reflex action, I threw my arms
up to protect my face, with my clenched fists over my eyes. I was engulfed in a red mist and lost
consciousness."
Back on the road, the scouts grew frightened, piled out of the car and ran to the farmhouse for help.
The farmer called the state police, who relayed the alarm to the sheriff. Two deputies arrived on the
scene just as the scoutmaster came stumbling out of the woods.
"He had the most scared look I've ever seen," one of the deputies told me. The scoutmaster poured out
his fantastic story to the deputies and then accompanied them back to the clearing. They found his
flashlight on the ground, still burning, and a crushed place where someone had been lying.
The whole party went off to the sheriff's office, where the scoutmaster was examined. They found that
the backs of both arms were scorched and the top of his cap – long-visored fishing or skiing mode –
had been scorched, too. They notified the Air Force.
We questioned the scoutmaster at length the evening after we arrived. He told a consistent story.
When we got through, he asked if he could talk to anyone about the event, or should he keep buttoned
up? "That's up to you," I told him. "The Air Force doesn't try to censor these stories."
We talked to his employer, who said he was a fine fellow. The next morning we went out to the scene
and combed it foot by foot. The only theory we had was that he had been struck by lightning – possibly
ball lightning – but there was no sign of lightning having struck the area.
We returned to the base and found it in an uproar. The scoutmaster had a lurid account in the local
paper. He reported that "top Air Force officials from Washington" had questioned him. "The Air Force
and I know what this thing was," he went on cryptically, "but I'm not allowed to tell because it would
create a panic."
I looked at Olssen and he looked at me. "Screwball," we said simultaneously.
The scoutmaster knew that we were from Dayton, not Washington, that we were plain AF captain and a
lieutenant, not "top officials," that we had offered no theory about the "saucer," had told him he
could talk freely. That afternoon we learned he had hired a press agent. That evening we did some
extensive digging into his background, and the next day we flew back to Dayton.
We brought his hat back for a check at the lab. They reported that the scorch marks were peculiar,
as if they had been burned by a hot iron. There were folded areas that were not scorched at all. The
lab expressed strong doubt that hat was on anyone's head when it was burned.
We sent out a few queries here and there, and found that he had a peculiar background for a
scoutmaster. He had told a strange story about serving in the Marines in the Pacific, where he had
landed alone on Jap-held islands and mapped them at night to make the Marine landing easier.
We queried the Marines and they told us that he had served six months and never left the country. He
had gone AWOL, got mixed up in a stolen car case, had been kicked out of the corps and had served
time. We checked the institution where he had done his term and learned that he was a somewhat
unstable character, to put it charitably, given to spinning wild yarns. He reportedly had once told
New York police he had seen two men hurl a woman out of a skyscraper and that the body landed at his
feet. Up sped a black limousine, he said, out jumped two other fellows who picked up the body, threw
it in the back seat and roared off. The police went with him to the scene, and sure enough, there
wasn't any body there. There wasn't any blood on the sidewalk, either.
We tipped off the Scout council and wrote off the story as a hoax. The fellow kept telling it,
however, and it got better all the time. Within a month, the saucer had acquired an unspeakable
monster, so foul that there were no words to describe it.
Later we had an even more fascinating "manned saucer" story from a radar station up near the
Canadian border. Two radar men stepped out of their shack one night and were astounded to see a great
glowing UFO low in the trees a few miles away. The generator that operated the radar set wasn't
operating and one of the man ran around to the Quonset hut to get it started.
While he was in the hut, the saucer flew up to the radar shack and halted, hovering in the air. A
sliding door opened, and a little man 4 feet high, came walking down some invisible steps. He was
quite remarkable, even for a saucer crewman – he had two heads, one an old one and the other a young
one. With proper respect for age, the young head let the old one do the talking.
"May I please have a drink of water?" the elderly head asked the radar operator.
The man stammered that they had no water, which subsequent investigation indeed proved to be the
truth. The old head thanked him politely, and the creature mounted the invisible steps and re-entered
the saucer which flew back to its original position among the trees. A little later the radar pair
pointed it out to several people, all of who saw it clearly. The other witnesses, however, insisted
that it was merely the moon.
A formal report was filed on this and forwarded to Dayton. We were still puzzling over it when we
got a terse supplementary notation from the local intelligence officer who had interrogated the men.
Behind the radar shack he had found two cases of empty beer bottles. "Please ignore original report,"
he wrote. "Disciplinary action has been taken."
In general, we didn't pay much attention to the reports that involved saucer crews, whether they
were little men, indescribable monsters, or spacemen with junior and senior heads. Once West Virginia
came up with a report of a metallic monster that blew poison gas at some children. We got an urgent
phone call from the local newspaper asking us when we would be down to investigate. I took the
call.
"Has this monster got a saucer?" I asked the reporter.
"Well, there's talk about some lights seen landing in the vicinity, but no one has located
anything."
I asked him how the monster got around, when he walked or flew.
"The stories say he's been crashing through the underbrush," the reporter said, "so I guess he's
walking."
"If he walks, he's an Army problem," I said. "Call me back if he starts to fly."
We never got a call, and the monster crashed off into one of the Sunday supplements.
The saucers hit the front pages in 96-point type in July, 1952, when they "buzzed" Washington, D.C.
The story caught the Air Force completely off balance and the handling of it got fouled up beyond all
recognition. It finally took a couple of generals and a press conference to straighten things out.
It started shortly after nine o'clock Saturday night, July 19, when the Air Route Traffic Control
Center of the Washington National Airport noticed some odd targets on their radar scope. They seemed
to be the shape and size of aircraft, but they didn't fly right. They would cruise around aimlessly at
from 100 to 130 mph and then suddenly vanish – "in a burst of speed," the saucer Boswells added later,
in dressing up the story. Shortly before midnight, the National Airport controllers called Bolling Air
Force Base, just across the Potomac, and asked if they had anything strange on their radar. Bolling
also was picking up strange targets. About this time Andrews AFB chimed in and reported that they had
some unknown objects on their scopes, too. Bolling, Washington National and Andrews are all tied
together in the common communications net, and they started comparing notes over the squawk box.
Once, at a point close to the Andrews range, where the three radar systems overlapped, they all
picked up what seemed to be the same target. Several people at Andrews were alerted and spotted a big
orange-red object hovering just about where radar had it.
Washington National called all commercial aircraft in the area and asked them to look for lights that
they couldn't identify as other aircraft. At 3:15 a.m., Capital Airlines Flight 807 reported seven
lights between Washington and Martinsburg, W. Va. – a section where some of the mysterious blips had
shown on the scopes. The captain of the airliner, a man with seventeen years' flying experience,
described the lights as hovering awhile and then moving up and down. Shortly later a Capital-National
flight approaching Washington from the south reported that a light had followed them to within four
miles of the airport.
At 4 a.m. an F-94 all-weather jet fighter was flown into the area and combed it thoroughly and could
find nothing.
The location of this flare-up – practically over the White House – plus the radar angle and the fact
that a fighter had been scrambled combined to make this story big news. The radar aspects in
particular impressed the newspapers and the wire services, and the case was played up as the first
time that "saucers" had been spotted by radar. All over the country people said, "They must be real if
radar picks them up." The night fighter roaring aloft to chase saucers away from Capitol Hill was the
final touch.
Actually, radar is as tricky as the imagination of a scared youngster alone in the house at midnight.
There are a number of ways radar can pick up objects that simply aren't there. An inversion layer in
the air will bend the radar beam and cause it to interfere with another radar station that ordinarily
is out of range. Or inversion will cause the scanning station to pick up ground targets – such as a
big truck. On the night the saucers "buzzed Washington" there was a temperature inversion and all the
sets were getting weather blips. The fact that three of them showed a blip at the same spot didn't
necessarily mean a thing. They all showed blips wherever they were turned.
When we talked to the men at Andrews who had seen the orange-red object they had already figured out
that it was a planet. The fact that a fighter had been sent up was not at all unusual. It is standard
procedure whenever the Air Defense Command gets a target that they can't identify over a "sensitive"
area. That's their job. We couldn't account for the airline sightings, and listed them as
unknown.
But by the time we had pieced all this together, the Washington saucer story was a couple of days
old, the papers were back on politics and hardly anyone was interested in a complex explanation of
just why an exciting story hadn't been true. This time lag was a real drawback in keeping the public
informed about the evaluations of the project. Someone out in Seattle or San Antonio or What Cheer,
Iowa, would report a saucer and the local paper would call us up and ask, "How about this? What was
it, anyway?" We'd tell them, in all honesty, "We don't know. We haven't been able to make our
evaluation yet." The story would hit the paper's front page the next day under the headline:
PREACHER SEES SAUCER
AIR FORCE CAN'T EXPLAIN
Just one week after the saucers buzzed Washington, they came back and buzzed it again – and again we
stubbed our toe on the story. The reporters got word of the story and hurried to the airport. This
time the all-weather fighters were called down right away. Commercial traffic was cleared out of the
area and things were set up to work an "intercept." Here the trouble began; some of the procedures
used in the situation are classified, so the reporters were shooed out of the radar room. Everyone was
excited, and the reporters bewildered by the sudden bum's rush. They knew that "something" had been
spotted over the capital again, and pretty soon they heard our jets roaring up and down through the
night--while something big went on behind firmly closed doors. The next day the papers broke out with
120-point bold headline type:
SAUCERS ELUDE 600 MPH JETS
Which was, after all, accurate in its way. The jets had been unable to find anything over Washington.
They would be directed to the spots where the "saucer" blips showed on the radar and fly right through
them. This was merely confirmation of what we'd learned the week before, that the blips were radar
aberrations.
The big black headlines were on every news rack in Washington when the Pentagon got a call from the
White House asking just exactly what was going on. White House calls were ordinarily handled by at
least a three-star general, but in this case, a captain – Ruppelt – was given the honor of explaining
what was going on over the head of the President. I think there was something in the tone of the query
that downgraded the assignment to my level. I made a reassuring report to Mr. Truman's air aide. Later
I was told that the President was listening in on the briefing but he didn't let out a peep.
The scare stories in the Washington press came smack in the middle of a record wave of saucer
sightings. The year 1952 had started modestly with eleven sightings in January and built steadily to
149 in June. This was almost as many as the project normally received in an entire year. While we were
digging our way out from under the unprecedented June reports, July inundated us with 409. The two
summer months produced as many sightings as the first four years of the Age of the Saucer. We went on
a 16-hour day.
"I wonder," said Olssen, "what ever happened to the guys who said the saucers would go away as soon
as people stopped talking about Kenneth Arnold?"
Prodded by the hubbub over the Washington flare-up and by the record crop of sightings, the Air
Force called a press conference on July 29 at the Pentagon. Maj. Gen. John A. Samford,
Air Force director of intelligence, went up against the biggest assemblage of newspapermen to turn out
for an Air Force conference since World War II. He was accompanied by Maj. Gen. Roger Ramey, director
of operations, and four technical men from ATIC – Col. Donald Bower, Capt. Roy James, Burgoyne
Griffing, and myself.
Samford gave the project a pat on the back for disposing of a lot of unknowns, but added:
"However, there have remained a percentage of this total – about 20 percent of the reports – that
have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things. We keep on being concerned about
them." He stressed that the most careful examination of the reports indicated no menace to the United
States.
The press was much more interested in the "saucers over Washington" angle and fired dozens of
questions about that incident, concentrating on the radar "confirmation." It seemed to be news to many
of them that radar is not infallible, that it is not a crystal-clear mirror that gives back exactly
what is in front of it.
Many of the newsmen were amazed that a big "naval battle" had been fought in World War II with a
nonexistent enemy because of tricks played by radar. The conference also brought out the fact that a
fighter pilot, following a radar "target" caused by a temperature inversion, once had followed the
bend of the image four times and found himself flying right at the ground. These incidents took a lot
of the edge off the capital saucer sensation.
I never got adjusted to the tremendous partisanship that the flying saucers inspired. Hardly anyone
was neutral about saucers. People would bend our ears by the hour proving: (1) Saucers were a lot of
damned nonsense and the Air Force was out of its mind to bother with investigating them, or (2) They
were space-ships whose existence was beyond question and the Air Force was out of its mind to try to
cover up the truth about them.
Both groups would wind up fixing us with a stern glare and demanding – "What do you think?"
I would tell them we were trying to conduct an open-minded investigation, and that so far we didn't
have sufficient data for a firm conclusion. This would just pour gasoline on the fire. People wanted a
firm "yes" or "no" about the saucers.
We had our most bitter arguments with the "fans," as we called the believers. They believed in
saucers with a passion that made a reasonable discussion almost hopeless.
Once, I talked to a well-known psychiatrist about this. He was a nonbeliever.
"Look," I said, "I can understand how a man like Arnold feels strongly about the existence of
saucers. He saw something. I can understand why anyone who has seen something that he can't explain
will argue for the existence of space ships. Such a theory gives him an answer to a personal riddle.
But why do thousands of people who have never seen a saucer swear that they exist?"
"I think that they want to believe in saucers from another planet," he said. "The will-to-believe is
a powerful thing, and it edits out reality. Visitation from another planet is a fascinating idea.
"The world we live in is becoming a place of increasingly unbearable tensions. The threat of atomic
destruction hangs over us all, and we are losing faith in the invincible intelligence of man. In eight
long years, the best brains on earth have frustrated each other in removing the specter of mass
destruction of whole nations.
"If the saucers are real, if they came from outer space, what vistas they would open up! So far they
have shown no menace. Whatever controlled them would be of a higher intelligence since we are only
beginning to fumble with the problem of space travel.
"So to people living humdrum and menaced lives, they hold out bright adventure that might remake the
world. Man is doing a poor job, so we bring into being something better than man."
In addition to the plain believers, there were the cultists and the screwballs. The cultists had
clubs, societies, associations, pins, conventions and special publications, and preached the saucer
the way a devout Mohammedan preached his belief in Allah.
According to their unshakable dogma, the Air Force is hiding the truth about the saucers in fear it
will panic the public. Secret safes at Dayton bulge with sensational sightings, authentic close-up
pictures, and wonderful movies of saucers, many in Kodachrome. Whenever a saucer lands or crashes,
teams of tight-lipped investigators rush out, scoop up the saucer or the pieces and cart it off to a
hidden laboratory. Meanwhile their colleagues hurry to the newspapers, flash their badges on the
editor and kill the story.
Everyone knows that Capt. Mantell was shot down by a giant saucer – his body was riddled with
bullets (version A) and his plane was scored with mysterious "lines of force" (version B). The project
at Dayton has rooms full of little men, pickled in alcohol, who landed in Colorado or Arizona or
Oregon and were killed by breathing our unfamiliar oxygen. Usually the little men are green, although
some were baked to crisp brown when our atmosphere turned their saucer into an incandescent
toaster.
The saucers that didn't carry little men are manned by monsters. And no questions, please, about
whether little men and the monsters are blood brothers or kissing cousins.
Each new item in this catalog of nonsense has been told as the straight truth.
The cult is nourished by literary procurers who seize on every sighting and process it for
consumption. They strip each report of any information that points to a natural explanation. They drop
off all qualifying data. They omit the analysis – except when the project frankly admits when it is
baffled. Then they present the residue as verified fact "straight from the files of Blue Book." A
popular variant on this is "from secret Air Force records."
In the scriptures of the cultist, everything reported to Blue Book is a saucer. The actual report may
describe the UFO as a light six inches in diameter, an orb twice the size of the moon, a black speck
in the sky, a strange blip on a radar scope, a cone-shaped object, a vague glow in the sky, a
cigar-shaped figure, or a splash of light like a comet's tail. These dissimilar objects are all
converted with a flick of the typewriter, into saucers.
All estimates of height, speed, and maneuvering are treated as cold fact. If a traveling salesman
driving down a highway at 65 mph, glances up and sees something flash across the sky at what he
guesses is 20 miles up and 8,000 miles an hour, the saucerian account comes out like this:
"At 3:17 p.m., on August 12, 1953, four miles west of Dubuque, Iowa, Joseph Doakes, a businessman,
saw a saucer traveling 8,000 mph 20 miles above the earth. Doakes, a man of excellent reputation who
does not drink, reported, 'I never saw anything like it.' The Air Force analyzed the sighting and was
completely baffled."
A few months ago, in Hollywood, I talked to Frank Scully, whose book Behind the Flying Saucer (sic)
went through ten editions and sent a shining, silvery chain of disk-shaped dollars spinning at
supersonic speeds into Scully's bank account. I was ribbing him about a couple of Southern California
characters who were outdoing each other – and Scully – with fantastic saucer stories. One wrote a book
about a citizen from Venus who landed his saucer in the California desert and had a long conversation
with the author. Character No. Two topped that one with a yarn about riding on a saucer to a hitherto
unknown planet named Clarion, whose female residents presumably are known as Clarionettes.
Scully, the staid old scientist who first put the story of the "little men from the saucers" between
book covers, was appalled at such "irresponsible stories." He complained bitterly about "the lunatic
fringe invading the saucer business," which gives a rough idea of the prevailing standards. The
cultists are nearing the limits imposed by the law of diminishing returns. About the only sensation
left for an author trying to break into the racket is to have his book delivered by little men riding
bona fide saucers with Venusian license plates.
The cultists watched the operation of Blue Book like suspicious wives eyeing wayward husbands.
Everything that we did – or failed to do – had significance. If we investigated a flamboyant "little
men" hoax, it was because we knew there are little men and we were trying to keep the secret bottled
up. If we ignored the story, we were playing a shrewd game of poker and cloaking the truth with a show
of contempt. The cultists even used to analyze our facial expressions at press conferences. I usually
made a "bland show of unconcern."
Once one of the project's technical advisers made the mistake of lapsing into mild satire in his
report. In considering the saucers-from-space theory, he noted that there had been speculation that
some of the UFOs behaved like animals. "There are few reliable reports," he commented dryly, "of
extraterrestrial animals." This quip was pounced on by the cult as an enormously significant slip-up
in our great conspiracy to hide the truth, and became an "official Air Force admission that some of
the saucers carried beings from outer space." Raymound Palmer, a science-fiction publisher, and
Kenneth Arnold, in their book The Coming of the Saucers, reprint this passage and exult: "But those
few, gentlemen! Those few! Where did you get them?"
Such experiences tended to make us cautious in our public announcements, and we tiptoed on verbal
eggs. This, of course, was taken by the cultists to be further evidence of Operation Cover-Up.
The saucer project attracted screwballs in droves. One gentleman, who was a plasterer through the
week and the shepherd of some off-beat religious sect on Sunday, telephoned me incessantly until I
gave him an appointment. He was a tall, hollow-eyed fellow who looked like an undertaker down on his
luck. A sister in his flock had solved the riddle of the saucers. She had it all written out, with
citations from the Bible as documentation, and he clutched the historic document tightly and kept a
wary eye on me. All he wanted was $15,000 cash.
I told him, as gently as possible, that the government didn't hand out that kind of money for a
saucer in the poke.
"All right, mister," he said, "I'll tell you what the saucers are. But you'll have to put the cash on
the barrelhead to find out how Sister Betty figured it out."
He took a deep breath. "The saucers are four angels dancing in a circle."
He grew surly when I didn't haul out a roll of crisp $100 bills, fresh from the U.S. Treasury, and
start counting them out for him.
"What's the matter, mister?" he asked. "Doesn't the Air Force want to solve this problem?"
I got off the hook by telling him that our budget had been cut and that he could make more with
Sister's secret peddling it to one of the big national magazines. He went off with a gleam in his
eye.
Then there were letters. They went into a special file with the cryptic notation "C.P." – for
crackpot. We got them by the hundreds.
From Campbell, Ohio, a gentleman offered us "spectrograms of saucer lights" at a price – and warned
us that he was selling "to the highest bidder, domestic or foreign." "These spectrograms are protected
against forcible seizure," he noted tersely, "and I would not recommend such action on your
part."
From Long Beach, Calif., a woman writes us a long series of letters about saucers "torching" her day
and night. "They also nip your toes," she complained. "They just make you sick."
My favorite was from a gentleman who signed himself "Uncle Sam's Most Unique Booster." He offered us
three working saucers in exchange for train fare from California to Dayton. "I fly them by changing
the potential energy in centrifugal force to a kinetic energy of 33 pounds to the square inch in the
form of a jet propulsion," he wrote. "Roll that around in your attic." His saucers were powered by
vacuum cleaner motors. If we weren't interested in them, he had an atomic machine "that makes yours
look sick," and a helicopter that folded up into a suitcase.
Obscured by the hoaxes, distorted by the literary charlatans who hail every vagrant light as a
verified space ship, the case of the flying saucer rests on the inexplicable instances that have
cropped up year after year since 1947.
In 1952, we extracted the best sightings from the files to see what kind of sense we could make from
them. These represented the cream of the reports and most of them had come through military channels.
This meant that they either had been made by military personnel or had undergone a preliminary check
at the point of origin.
Of the 2,199 sightings, 434 — 19.7 percent — were listed as unknown. Among them were sightings
reported by scientists and veteran pilots of excellent reputation, many of whom had been scornful
disbelievers until they had sighted their saucers. These reports included instances of flight
performance and maneuvers beyond the abilities of any known craft.
In addition to the Black Hills, South Dakota, case which I've already described, here are some of
the cases that the project was unable to crack:
INCIDENT NO. 2 – On July 29, 1952, near Port Huron, Mich., two F-94s were in the air making night
practice runs on a B-25. A radar station in the vicinity picked up an unknown object and asked one of
the planes to investigate. The jet went up to 20,000 feet where the pilot spotted the object visually.
He started to chase it, and the fleeing UFO and the pursuing jet both showed up on the radar scope,
which tracked the chase. The jet pilot switched on his gun radar, got an automatic lock-on. The object
easily kept out in front of the jet, even when the pilot kicked on his afterburner. Our investigation
showed there were no other planes in the vicinity, and the double radar verification ruled out
planets, stars, reflections, hallucinations.
INCIDENT NO. 3 – On July 24, 1952, two Air Force colonels stationed at the Pentagon were en route in
a B-25 from Hamilton AFB to Colorado Springs. They were flying at 11,000 feet near Carson Sink, Nev.
It was 3:40 p.m. on a calm, clear day with unlimited visibility. Suddenly they sighted three silver
objects shaped like arrowheads approaching them at terrific speed. The objects first appeared at the 1
o'clock position and passed the B-25 in a continuous bank. The two colonels both observed the three
strange objects carefully and were positive that they were no craft that they had ever seen before.
They estimated their size at about that of an F-86, and their distance at the point of passage at
between 400 and 800 yards. Both men reported that the objects had a "definite ridge along the top,"
and had sharply defined outlines. Neither man was a flying saucer believer.
INCIDENT NO. 4 – On January 28, 1953, at 9:35 p.m., a jet pilot near Albany, Ga., spotted "an
extremely bright light" at 10 o'clock high. At first he thought it was another aircraft or an
unusually bright star, but when he went up to 10,000 feet it appeared to be ahead and a bit below him.
When first spotted, the light was white, but later it began changing constantly from white to orange
and back to white again. The object was in view for 17 minutes. In the last 15 seconds it changed
shape from circular to triangular, and then the triangles split into two triangles – one immediately
above the other – and both disappeared as if someone snapped off the light.
The pilot called Albany, Ga., but before he could make his amazed report, ground asked him if he had
seen anything unusual. They advised him that ground radar had picked up both the jet and a strange
target. On the radar scope, when the jet had speeded up, the target had stepped up, too, to maintain
its lead on him.
INCIDENT NO. 5 – Shortly after midnight on August 5, 1952, two airmen were walking toward the tower
at Haneda AFB in Japan to begin their shift when they spotted a large round object bearing a light in
the sky. Hurrying to the tower, they pointed it out to the other tower operators, and they took turns
observing the object through 7x50 binoculars. Under the glasses, a less brilliant light could be seen
around the edge of the object. The tower people called radar and gave them a bearing on the thing, and
radar picked up a target in the immediate area. By correlating movement of the radar target and the
visual UFO, they established that they were both observing the same object. The radar tracked the
object at speeds varying from hovering to 300 knots. An F-94 was scrambled and vectored into the
target. It got a radar lock-on and started to close on the object. At 6,000 yards, the jet lost radar
contact and at the same time the tower and ground radar lost it, too. At the end of the sighting, the
object as seen on the radar "broke up into three pieces which flew formation at quarter-mile
intervals." During the incident, a weather balloon was released at the base, and the witnesses
reported its light was much dimmer than that of the UFO. One of the puzzling aspects of the incident
was that neither the jet pilot nor the radar crew was able to get a visual sighting on the object,
although each was closer to it than the air base tower.
INCIDENT NO. 6 – On the night of January 26, 1953, a group of Air Force people stationed at a radar
site in New Mexico observed a "very bright, reddish-white" object west of their station and then
picked it up on their radar. The object was in view about 45 minutes both visually and by radar. The
object moved behind a hill and then reappeared. Radar showed it 9 miles from the station, traveling
north at a lazy 12 to 15 knots at 10,000 to 15,000 feet. Although a balloon was in the vicinity, the
UFO traveled steadily almost directly into the wind.
INCIDENT NO. 7 – On February 16, 1953, at 11:30 p.m., a pilot and an instructor in a C-47 over
Turnagain Arm – a bay near Anchorage, Alaska – saw a red light that they judged to be a jet aircraft,
five miles away. But as they watched it, it got bigger and brighter, as if headed toward them. Unable
to see any green navigation light, they asked the tower at Elmendorf AFB if any other craft were in
the area. The tower said there was none, and then made a radar check with negative results. The object
was first seen low and definitely below the horizon. The C-47 was flying at 2,000 feet. The object
continued to close on the C-47, increasing in brilliance and size until it was two or three times the
original size. Then it seemed to stop and hang suspended for five minutes. The pilots, still thinking
it might be another aircraft, headed toward Elmendorf, where the tower asked if they could still see
the light. It was still visible, and the tower asked them to try to intercept it. As the C-47 took up
the chase, the light appeared to accelerate and shortly vanished.
The following night, about 8 p.m., five Air Police on patrol spotted the same – or another – red
light near the end of one of the Elmendorf runways. By comparing it with known lights at the base,
they judged it to be similar to a 36-inch light seen from 3/8 mile away. It was in a gradual climb, at
about jet speed, headed for Anchorage. The Air Police called the tower. It had nothing on radar, but
ordered up a jet to intercept. As the jet became airborne, the object showed a noticeable increase in
speed, and when the jet came around to get on an intercept course, the light climbed vertically into
the overcast at 5,500 feet.
The Air Police did not know of the original sighting when they made their report. A careful check
showed no balloons in the area. Stars and planets were eliminated because the first night the object
was below the horizon, and the second night there was a solid overcast. If it had been a conventional
craft, the radar would have picked it up. If it had been a stray balloon that wandered in from some
distance, on the first night the C-47 should easily have closed on it and passed it. On the second
night, its sudden vertical rise disposed of the drifting balloon theory.
These cases, and the hundreds more like them, are the core of the flying saucer mystery. Despite our
best efforts over a period of seven years – assisted by top-grade technical and scientific advisers –
we were unable to crack them. They remain to baffle and intrigue millions. And despite the improvement
in methods of analysis that has resulted from our experience, scores of unknowns are added to the
project's files each year.
Hundreds of people have asked me, "What do you think, yourself?"
The job of Project Blue Book was fact-finding, not speculation. Our investigation of the saucer
sightings was aimed at compiling as much data as we could, in the hope that it would provide the basis
for analysis that would answer the seven-year mystery. The project failed in this attempt. The mystery
of the saucers is still as baffling as it was the day that Kenneth Arnold landed his plane and told
the story of what he had seen near Mt. Rainier.
My own opinion is that either the saucers are interplanetary or they do not exist. I do not believe
that there is enough evidence at hand to choose between these alternatives. You can argue either case
independently, and in the end you will have only an opinion.
In the operation of Blue Book, we briefed a number of assemblies of scientists – guided missile
experts, atomic people, experimental aircraft technicians, physicists, etc. We found them intensely
interested in the saucer mystery. At Los Alamos, for example, we jammed an amphitheater with standees
and answered questions for three hours after we concluded our briefing.
These people were trained in the scientific attitude, as opposed to the cultists who accept every
wild-eyed report as a certified, gold-sealed fact. Among them were people who had seen things that
they could not explain. They were eager for facts that would help them put their experience into
perspective.
These are the facts upon which I think that any responsible conclusion about them must be based:
- To my knowledge, the Air Force has not concealed any secret sensations about the saucers. In the
earliest days of the investigation, the project was secret. There was considerable alarm then, and
some officials thought that the objects might be something new from Russia. As the alarm waned, the
information was declassified. Whatever secrecy has been thrown around subsequent incidents has been
only to protect classified information – precise locations of radar stations, performance data on
jet fighters, etc. We also protected the identity of informants who wished to remain anonymous. We
did this to encourage people of standing to feel free to report any credible incident. Beyond these
exceptions, the Air Force knows nothing about the subject that it is not telling.
- Project Blue Book was given no orders from above about "handling the saucer problem." The story
that we were a bunch of dupes, reciting whatever the top echelons told us to say, is a lot of
nonsense. We briefed the echelons above us, not vice versa. I once made a personal report to
Secretary for Air Thomas Finletter at the Pentagon. He was accompanied by a full squad of advisers
and technicians. He thanked me when I was through. I gave him no information that is not in this
account.
- We had no evidence whatever that the saucers are some supersecret U.S. development. On the
contrary, we had specific disclaimers of this from top Air Force, Army, Navy and Department of
Defense officials. Ordinary horse sense is against this theory. If the U.S. had flying saucers that
can perform the way saucer-sighters describe them, why would the government be pouring billions of
dollars into conventional – and inferior – planes?
- We also had no evidence that the saucers are of foreign manufacture. Again, logic opposes such a
belief. The chief suspect in the "foreign saucer" theory is Russia. Why would Russia try out such a
revolutionary device over the U.S. when it has vast stretches of land behind the Iron Curtain, where
the test could be conducted in complete secrecy? Any man-made device is certain to fail sooner or
later. The more complex the device, the higher the failure probability. Yet in seven years, with
thousands of saucer sightings, not one has been known to have crashed.
These four points may bring you to the possibility that the saucers are craft from outer space. As
staggering as the implications may be, to my mind this is the most acceptable theory – if the saucers
exist. There is no other alternative.
What is the argument that they are nonexistent? It has some stubborn facts on its side.
First, the residue of unknowns shows no common characteristics. Their shapes, performances, times of
appearance, colors, locations showed the same bewildering variety as the 80 percent that we were able
to explain. The 434 unknowns included little lights, big lights, multicolored lights, disks seen by
day, cigar shapes, orbs and dots of lights. To argue that the hard core of unknowns are all "saucers"
is inaccurate. They include a variety of dissimilar objects. This variety gives strength to the theory
that the unknowns are merely the same known objects as the 80 percent of sightings we were able to
explain. There is a strong belief in the Air Force that the unknowns are "unknown" only because we
lacked sufficient data on them. This belief is supported by the fact that our percentage of
explanations rose with the intensity of our investigation.
Secondly, there were no bursts of unknowns. Over the years they roughly followed the total number of
sightings, rising and falling with the volume of reports. In general, there was no geographic
clustering of unknowns. For a time, there were more sightings around certain atomic installations and
defense areas. This concentration was not large enough, in our opinion, to have significance.
Residents of such areas are more security conscious than people living in nonsensitive areas, and
quite possibly we got more sightings from atomic and defense sections because more people there were
scanning the skies.
Some theorists have figured that another planet sending emissaries to the earth would dispatch them
at the point where their orbit would bring them closest to earth. Assuming a set travel time, this
would bring their craft into our ken at a regular time. For several years there was a sharp rise in
saucer reports during the month of July. But in 1953, the sightings in the month took a sharp
drop.
Thirdly, in the seven years there has been no physical evidence of the existence of saucers. The Air
Force has found no evidence that a saucer has ever crashed or landed. It has seen no photographic
evidence that it can credit. It has seen no "hardware" that it cannot explain as man-made.
Against those arguments stands the testimony of hundreds of people. They have seen something
incredible. They include hundreds of people who scoffed at flying saucers until they saw something
that bore no relation to anything they had ever seen. They include hard-bitten airmen familiar with
all the hallucinations of flying, sober scientists who applied every natural explanation – and
stubbornly insisted, "It was something else."
Among these sightings have been a small number that have been confirmed by radar. Whatever the object
was, it was not a hallucination. And frequently, it outperformed any craft known on earth.
The fact that the unknowns show a variety of shapes and sizes might be explained by two things. One
is the unreliability of witnesses. A saucer described as "50 feet in diameter" may be 150 feet – if it
is further from the observer than he believes. The variety in sizes of the unknowns could be explained
by misjudgments in distance, a common error. If more accurate data were available, the unknowns might
well show a greater consistency in size.
The same is true of shapes. A disk traveling broadside to the witness would appear to be an orb. As
its angle tilted, it would become football-shaped and finally take on the appearance of a cigar.
The sighting of lights at night may have no relevance to the actual size of the craft that carries
them – just as a navigation light on a plane gives no hint to the size of the ship.
The absence of physical evidence – such as crashed saucers – supports the theory that they are not
of this world. We have reliable data on the failure factor of man-made devices. If the saucers were
made by Americans or Russians, their imperfections would have brought them down by now. But if they
are interplanetary, they may be contrived by a civilization so far advanced as to have reduced the
probability of failure to near zero. Or they may utilize a principle of flight unknown to us. A craft
capable of traversing the vast distances of space might fly almost endlessly in the relatively tiny
confines of our air envelope without failure.
The Air Force has never ruled out the possibility that we are being visited from outer space. It says
only that it has no evidence to support this possibility.
— Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, USAFR