Just the idea of gigantic flying disks was incredible enough. It was
almost as hard to believe that such missiles could have been developed
without something leaking out. Yet we had produced the A-bomb in
comparative secrecy, and I knew we were working on long-range guided
missiles. There was already a plan for a three-thousand-mile test
range. Our supersonic planes had hit around two thousand miles an hour.
Our two-stage rockets had gone over two hundred miles high, according
to reports. If an atomic engine had been secretly developed, it could
explain the speed and range of the saucers.
But I kept coming back to Mantell’s death and the Air Force orders for
pilots to chase the saucers. If the disks were American missiles, that
didn’t jibe.
When I reached the lobby, I found it was ten after four. I caught a
taxi and made the Congressional Limited with just one minute to spare.
In the club car, I settled down to look at Purdy’s summary.
Skipping through the pages, I saw several familiar cases. Here and
there, Purdy had scrawled brief comments or suggestions. Beside the
Eastern Airline report of a double-decked saucer, he had written:
“Check rumor same type seen over Holland about this date. Also, similar
Philippine Islands report—date unknown.”
I went back to the beginning. The first case listed was that of Kenneth
Arnold, a Boise businessman, who had set off the saucer scare. Arnold
was flying his private plane from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, when
he saw a bright flash on his wing.
Looking toward Mount Rainier, he saw nine gleaming disks outlined
against the snow, each one about the size of a C-54.
“They flew close to the mountaintops, in a diagonal chainlike line,” he
said later. “It was as if they were linked together.”
The disks appeared to be twenty to twenty-five miles away, he said, and
moving at fantastic speed. Arnold’s estimate was twelve hundred miles
an hour.
“I watched them about three minutes,” he said. “They were swerving in
and out around the high mountain peaks. They were flat, like a pie pan,
and so shiny they reflected the sun like a mirror. I never saw anything
so fast.”
The date was June 24, 1947.
On this same day there was another saucer report. which received very
little notice. A Portland prospector named Fred Johnson, who was
working up in the Cascade Mountains, spotted five or six disks banking
in the sun. He watched them through his telescope several seconds. then
he suddenly noticed that the compass hand on his special watch was
weaving wildly from side to side. Johnson insisted he had not heard of
the Arnold report, which was not broadcast until early evening.
Kenneth Arnold’s story was generally received with amusement. Most
Americans were unaware that the Pentagon had been receiving disk
reports as early as January. The news and radio comments on Arnold’s
report brought several other incidents to light, which observers had
kept to themselves for fear of ridicule.
At Oklahoma City, a private pilot told Air Force investigators he had
seen a huge round object in the sky during the latter part of May. It
was flying three times faster than a jet, he said, and without any
sound. Citizens of Weiser, Idaho, described two strange fast-moving
objects they had seen on June 12. The saucers were heading southeast,
now and then dropping to a lower altitude, then swiftly climbing again.
Several mysterious objects were reported flying at great speed near
Spokane, just three days before Arnold’s experience. And four days
after his encounter, an Air Force pilot flying near Lake Meade, Nevada,
was startled to see half a dozen saucers flash by his plane.
Even at this early point in the scare, official reports were
contradicting each other. just after Arnold’s story broke, the Air
Force admitted it was checking on the mystery disks. On July 4 the Air
Force stated that no further investigation was needed; it was all
hallucination. That same day, Wright Field told the Associated Press
that the Air Materiel Command was trying to find the answer.
The Fourth of July was a red-letter day in the flying-saucer mystery.
At Portland, Oregon, hundreds of citizens, including former Air Force
pilots, police, harbor pilots, and deputy sheriffs, saw dozens of
gleaming disks flying at high speed. The things; appeared to be at
least forty thousand feet in the air—perhaps much higher.
That same day, disks were sighted at Seattle, Vancouver, and other
northwest cities. The rapidly growing reports were met with mixed
ridicule and alarm. One of the skeptical group was Captain E. J. Smith,
of United Airlines.
“I’ll believe them when I see them,” he told airline employees, before
taking off from Boise the afternoon of the Fourth.
Just about sunset, his airliner was flying over Emmett, Idaho, when
Captain Smith and his copilot, Ralph Stevens, saw five queer objects in
the sky ahead. Smith rang for the stewardess, Marty Morrow, and the
three of them watched the saucers for several minutes. Then four more
of the disks came into sight. Though it was impossible to tell their
size, because their altitude was unknown, the crew was sure they were
bigger than the plane they were in. After about ten minutes the disks
disappeared.
The Air Force quickly denied having anything resembling the! objects
Captain Smith described.
“We have no experimental craft of that nature in Idaho—or anywhere
else,” an official said in Washington. “We’re completely mystified.”
The Navy said it had made an investigation, and had no answers. There
had been rumors that the disks were “souped-up” versions of the Navy’s
“Flying Flapjack,” a twin-engined circular craft known technically as
the XF-5-U-1. But the Navy insisted that only one model had been built,
and that it was now out of service.
In Chicago, two astronomers spiked guesses that the disks might be
meteors. Dr. Girard Kieuper, director of the University of Chicago
observatory, said flatly that they couldn’t be meteors. “They’re
probably man-made,” he told the A.P. Dr. Oliver Lee, director of
Northwestern’s observatory, agreed with Kieuper.
“The Army, Navy, and Air Force are working secretly on all sorts of
things,” he said. “Remember the A-bomb secrecy—and the radar signals to
the moon.”
As I went through Purdy’s summary, I recalled my own reaction after the
United Airlines report. After seeing the Pentagon comment, I had called
up Captain Tom Brown, at Air Force Public Relations.
“Are you really taking this seriously?” I asked him.
“Well, we can’t just ignore it,” he said. “There are too many reliable
pilots telling the same story—flat, round objects able to outmaneuver
ordinary planes, and faster than anything we have. Too many stories
tally.”
I told him I’d heard that the Civil Air Patrol in Wisconsin and other
states was starting a sky search.
“We’ve got a jet at Muroc, and six fighters standing by at Portland
right now,” Brown said.
“Armed?”
“I’ve no report on that. But I know some of them carry photographic
equipment.”
Two days later an airline pilot from the Coast told me that some
fighters had been armed and the pilots ordered to bring down the disks
if humanly possible. That same day, Wright Field admitted it was
checking stories of disk-shaped missiles seen recently in the Pacific
northwest and in Texas.
Following this was an A.P. story, dated July 7, quoting an unnamed Air
Force official in Washington:
“The flying saucers may be one of three things:
“1. Solar reflection on low-hanging clouds. [A Washington scientist,
asked for comment, said this was hardly possible.]
“2. Small meteors which break up, their crystals catching the rays of
the sun. But it would seem that they would have been spotted falling
and fragments would have been found.
“3. Icing conditions could have formed large hailstones, and they might
have flattened out and glided a bit, giving the impression of
horizontal movement even though falling vertically.”
By this time everyone was getting into the act.
“The disks are caused by the transmutation of atomic energy,” said an
anonymous scientist, supposed to be on the staff of California Tech.
The college quickly denied it.
Dr. Vannevar Bush, world-famous scientist, and Dr. Merle Tuve, inventor
of the proximity fuse, both declared they would know of any secret
American missiles—and didn’t.
At Syracuse, New York, Dr. Harry Steckel, Veterans Administration
psychiatrist, scoffed at the suggestion of mass hysteria. “Too many
sane people are seeing the things. The government is probably
conducting some revolutionary experiments.”
On July 8 more disks were reported. Out at Muroc Air Force Base, where
top-secret planes and devices are tested, six fast-moving silvery-white
saucers were seen by pilots and ground officers.
That afternoon the Air Force revealed it was working on a case
involving a Navy rocket expert named C. T. Zohm. While on a secret Navy
mission to New Mexico, in connection with rocket tests, Zohm had seen a
bright silvery disk flying above the desert. He was crossing the desert
with three other scientists when he saw the strange object flashing
northward at an altitude of about ten thousand feet.
“I’m sure it was not a meteor,” said Zohm. “It could have been a guided
missile, but I never heard of anything like it.”
By this time, saucer reports had come in from almost forty states.
Alarm was increasing, and there were demands that radar be used to
track the disks. The Air Force replied that there was not enough radar
equipment to blanket the nation, but that its pilots were on the
lookout for the saucers.
One report mentioned a curious report from Twin Falls, Idaho. The disk
sighted there was said to have flown so low that the treetops whirled
as if in a violent storm. Someone had phoned Purdy about a disk tracked
by weather-balloon observers at Richmond, Virginia. There was another
note on a sighting at Hickam Field, Honolulu, and two reports of
unidentified objects seen near Anchorage, Alaska.
A typed list of world-wide sightings had been made up by the staff at
_True_. It contained many cases that were new to me, reports from
Paraguay, Belgium, Turkey, Holland, Germany, and the Scandinavian
countries. At the bottom of this memo Purdy had written: “Keep checking
on rumor that the Soviet has a Project Saucer, too. Could be planted.”
From the mass of reports, John DuBarry, the aviation editor of _True_,
had methodically worked out an average picture of the disks: “The
general report is that they are round or oval (this could be an
elliptical object seen end-on), metallic looking, very bright—either
shining white or silvery colored. They can move at extremely high
speed, hover, accelerate rapidly, and outmaneuver ordinary aircraft.
“The lights are usually seen singly—very few formations reported. They
seem to have the same speed, acceleration, and ability to maneuver. In
several cases, they have been able to evade Air Force planes in night
encounters.”
Going over the cases, I realized that Purdy and his staff had dug up at
least fifty reports that had not appeared in the papers. (A few of
these proved incorrect, but a check with the Air Force case reports
released on December 30, 1949, showed that _True’s_ files contained all
the important items.) These cases included sightings at eleven Air
Force bases and fourteen American airports, reports from ships at sea,
and a score of encounters by airline and private pilots.
Witnesses included Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force officers;
state and city police; F.B.I. agents; weather observers, shipmasters,
astronomers, and thousands of good solid American citizens. I learned
later that many witnesses had been investigated by the F.B.I. to weed
out crackpot reports.
I ended up badly puzzled. The evidence was more impressive than I had
suspected. It was plain that many reports had been entirely suppressed,
or at least kept out of the papers. There was something ominous about
it. No matter what the answer, it was serious enough to be kept
carefully hidden.
If it were a Soviet missile, I thought, God help us. They’d scooped up
a lot of Nazi scientists and war secrets. And the Germans had been far
ahead of us on guided missiles. But why would they give us a two-year
warning, testing the things openly over America? It didn’t make sense.