When I reached home, I found a brief letter from Ken Purdy.
Dear Don:
The Mantell and Eastern cases both look good. I don’t see how they can
brush them off. It looks more like the interplanetary answer to me, but
we won’t decide on treatment until we’re sure. [I had suggested two or
three angles, if this proved the real answer.]
Who would be the best authority to check our disk operation theory and
give us more details on directional control? I’d like to have it
checked by two more engineers.
KEN
Next day, I dug out my copy of Boal’s interview with D———, the famous
aircraft designer.
“Certainly the flying saucers are possible,” the designer had told
Boal. “Give me enough money and I’ll build you one. It might have to be
a model because the fuel would be a problem. If the saucers that have
been seen came from other worlds, which isn’t at all Buck Rogerish,
they may be powered with atomic energy or by the energy that produces
cosmic rays—which is many times more powerful—or by some other fuel or
natural force that our research hasn’t yet discovered. But the circular
airfoil is quite feasible.
“It wouldn’t have the stability of the conventional airplane, but it
would have enormous maneuverability—it could rise vertically, hover,
descend vertically, and fly at extremely high speed, with the proper
power. Don’t take my word for it. Check with other engineers.”
Before looking up a private engineer I had in mind, I went to the
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The N.A.C.A. is America’s
most authoritative source of aerodynamic knowledge. I knew they had
already tried out disk-shaped airfoils, and I asked about this first. I
found that two official N.A.C.A. reports, Technical Note 539 and Report
431, discuss tests on circular and elliptical Clark Y airfoils. Both
reports state that these designs were found practical.
Later, I talked with one of the top engineers in the N.A.C.A. Without
showing him D———’s sketch, I asked how a disk might operate.
“It could be built with variable-direction jet or rocket nozzles,” be
said. “The nozzles would be placed around the rim, and by changing
their direction the disk could be made to rise and descend vertically.
It could hover, fly straight ahead, and make sharp turns.
“Its direction and velocity would be governed by the number of nozzles
operating, the power applied, and the angle at which they were tilted.
They could be pointed toward the ground, rearward, in a lateral
direction, or in various combinations.
“A disk flying level, straight ahead, could be turned swiftly to right
or left by shifting the angles of the nozzles or cutting off power from
part of the group. This method of control would operate in the earth’s
atmosphere and also, using rocket power, in free space, where
conventional controls would be useless.”
The method he had described was not the one which D——— had outlined.
“What about a rotating disk?” I asked the N.A.C.A. man. “Suppose you
had one with a stationary center, and a large circular section rotating
around it? The rotating part would have a camber built into it, or it
would have slotted vanes.”
He gave me a curious look, “Where’d you get that idea about the
camber?”
I told him it had come to me from _True_.
“It could be done,” he said. “The slotted-vanes method has already been
tried. There’s an engineer in Glendale, California, who’s built a
model. His name’s E. W. Kay.”
He gave me a few details on how a cambered or slotted-vane rotating
disk might operate, then interrupted himself to ask me what I thought
the saucers were.
“They’re either interplanetary or some secret development,” I said.
‘What do you think?”
“The N.A.C.A. has no proof they even exist,” he answered.
When I left the building a few minutes later, I was still weighing that
statement. If the Air Force or the Navy had a secret disk device, the
N.A.C.A. would almost certainly know about it. The chances were that
any disk-shaped missile or new type of circular aircraft would first
have been tested in the N.A.C.A. wind tunnels at Langley Field. If the
saucers were interplanetary, the N.A.C.A.—at least top officials—would
probably have been in on any discussion of the disks’ performance.
Either way, the N.A.C.A.’s official attitude could be expected to match
the Pentagon’s.
After lunch, I took a taxi to the office of the private engineer. Like
D———, he has asked that he not be quoted by name. The name I am using,
Paul Redell, will serve that purpose. Redell is a well-known
aeronautical engineer. He has worked with major aircraft companies and
served as a special consultant to government agencies and the
industries. He is also a competent pilot.
Although I had known him several years, he refused at first to talk
about the saucers. Then I realized he thought I meant to quote him. I
showed him some of the material I had roughed out, in which names were
omitted or changed as requested.
“All right,” Redell said finally. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you can tell us. But first, your ideas on these sketches.” I
showed him D———’s drawings and then gave him the high points of the
investigation. When I mentioned the mystery-light incident at Fairfield
Suisan Air Force Base, Redell sat up quickly.
“The Gorman case again!”
“We heard about some other ‘light’ cases,” I said. “One was at Las
Vegas.”
“I know about that one. That is, it you mean the green light—wait a
minute!” Redell frowned into space for a few seconds, “You say that
Fairfield Suisan sighting was on December third? Then the Las Vegas
sighting was only a few days later. It was the first week of the month,
I’m positive.”
“Those light reports have got me stumped,” I said. “A light just can’t
fly around by itself. And those two-foot disks—”
“You haven’t worked on the Gorman case?” asked Redell.
I told him I hadn’t thought it was coming up on my schedule.
“Leave these sketches here,” he said. “Look into that Gorman sighting.
Then check on our plans for space exploration. I’ll give you some
sources. When you get through, come on back and we’ll talk it over.”
The Gorman “saucer dogfight” had been described in newspapers; the
pilot had reported chasing a swiftly maneuvering white light, which had
finally escaped him. Judging from the Project “Saucer” preliminary
report, this case had baffled all the Air Force investigators. When I
met George Gorman, I found him to be intelligent, coolheaded, and very
firmly convinced of every detail in his story. I had learned something
about his background. He had had college training. During the war, he
had been an Air Force instructor, training French student pilots. In
Fargo, his home, he had a good reputation, not only for veracity but as
a businessman. Only twenty-six, he was part owner of a construction
company, and also the Fargo representative for a hardware-store chain.
Even knowing all this, I found it hard at first to believe some of the
dogfight details. But the ground observers confirmed them.
It was about nine o’clock in the evening, October 1, 1948. Gorman, now
an Air National Guard lieutenant, had been on a practice flight in an
F-51 fighter. The other pilots on this practice patrol had already
landed. Gorman had just been cleared by the C.A.A. operator in the
Fargo Airport tower when he saw a fast-moving light below his circling
fighter.
From his altitude, 4,500 feet, it appeared to be the tail light of a
swiftly flying plane. As nearly as he could tell, it was 1,000 feet
high, moving at about 250 m.p.h. Gorman called the tower to recheck his
clearance. He was told the only other plane in the area was a Piper
Cub. Gorman Could see the Cub plainly outlined below him. There was a
night football game going on, and the field was brightly lighted. But
the Cub was nowhere near the strange light.
As the mystery light raced above the football field. Gorman noticed an
odd phenomenon. Instead of seeing the silhouette of a plane, he saw no
shape at all around the light. By contrast, he could see the Cub’s
outline clearly.
Meantime, the airport traffic controller, L. D. Jensen, had also
spotted the queer light. Concerned with the danger of collision—he said
later that he, too, thought it a plane’s tail light—he trained his
binoculars on it. Like Gorman, he was unable to distinguish a shape
near the light. Neither could another C.A.A. man who was with him in
the tower, a Fargo resident named Manuel E. Johnson.
Up in the F-51, Gorman dived on the light, which was steadily blinking
on and off.
“As I closed in,” he told Project “Saucer” men later, “it suddenly
became steady and pulled up into a sharp left turn. It was a clear
white and completely roundabout six to eight inches in diameter.
“I thought it was making a pass at the tower. I dived after it and
brought my manifold pressure up to sixty, but I couldn’t catch the
thing.”
Gorman reported his speed at full power as 350 to 400 miles per hour.
During the maneuvers that followed, both the C.A.A. men watched from
the tower. Jensen was using powerful night glasses, but still no shape
was visible near the mysterious light. The fantastic dogfight continued
for twenty minutes. Gorman described it in detail.
“When I attempted to turn with the light, I blacked out temporarily,
owing to excessive speed. I am in fairly good physical condition, and I
don’t believe there are many, if any, pilots who could withstand the
turn and speed effected by the light and remain conscious.”
During these sharp maneuvers, the light climbed quickly, then made
another left bank.
“I put my fifty-one into a sharp turn and tried to cut it off,” said
Gorman. “By then we were at about seven thousand feet, Suddenly it made
a sharp right turn and we headed straight at each other. Just when we
were about to collide I guess I lost my nerve. I went into a dive and
the light passed over my canopy at about five hundred feet. Then it
made a left circle about one thousand feet above and I gave chase
again.”
When collision seemed imminent a second time, the object shot straight
into the air. Gorman climbed after it at full throttle.
Just about this time, two. other witnesses, a private pilot and his
passenger, saw the fast-moving light. The pilot was Dr. A. D. Cannon,
an oculist; his passenger was Einar Nelson. Dr. Cannon later told
investigators the light was moving at high speed. He thought it might
be a Canadian jet fighter from over the border. (A careful check with
Canadian air officials ruled out this answer.) After landing at the
airport, Dr. Cannon and Mr. Nelson again watched the light, saw it
change direction and disappear.
Meanwhile, Gorman was making desperate efforts to catch the thing. He
was now determined to ram it, since there seemed nothing solid behind
it to cause a dangerous crash. If his fighter was disabled, or if it
caught fire, he could bail out.
But despite the F-51’s fast climb, the light still outdistanced him. At
14,000 feet, Gorman’s plane went into a power stall, He made one last
try, climbing up to 17,000 feet. A few moments later, the light turned
in a north-northwest direction and quickly disappeared.
Throughout the dogfight, Gorman noticed no deviation on his
instruments, according to the Project “Saucer” report. Gorman did not
confirm or deny this when I talked with him. But he did agree with the
rest of the Project statement. He did not notice any sound, odor, or
exhaust trail.
Gorman’s remarks about ramming the light reminded me of what Art Green
had said. When I asked Gorman about the court-martial rumor, he gave me
a searching glance.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Several places,” I told him. “At Chicago, in Salt Lake City—in fact,
we’ve been hearing it all over.”
“Well, there’s nothing to it,” Gorman declared. He changed the subject.
Some time afterward, a Fargo pilot told me there had been trouble over
the ramming story.
“But it wasn’t Gorman’s fault. Somebody else released that report to
the A. P. The news story didn’t actually say there was an Air Force
order to ram it, but the idea got around, and we heard that Washington
squawked. Gorman had a pretty rough time of it for a while. Some of the
newspapers razzed his story. And the Project ‘Saucer’ teams really
worked on him. I guess they were trying to scare him into saying he was
mistaken, and it was a balloon.”
When I asked Gorman about this, he denied he’d had rough treatment by
the Project teams.
“Sure, they asked about a thousand questions, and I could tell they
thought it might be a hoax at first. But that was before they quizzed
the others who saw it.”
“Anybody suggest it was a balloon?” I said casually.
“At first, they were sure that’s what it was,” answered Gorman. “You
see, there was a weather balloon released here. You know the kind, it
has a lighted candle on it. The Project teams said I’d chased after
that candle and just imagined the light’s maneuvers—confused it with my
own movement, because of the dark.”
Gorman grinned. “They had it just about wrapped up—until they talked to
George Sanderson. He’s the weather observer. He was tracking the
balloon with a theodolite, and he showed them his records. The time and
altitudes didn’t fit, and the wind direction was wrong. The balloon was
drifting in the opposite direction. Both the tower men backed him up.
So that killed the weather-balloon idea.”
The next step by Project “Saucer” investigators had been to look for
some unidentified aircraft. This failed, too. Obviously, it was only
routine; the outline of a conventional plane would certainly have been
seen by Gorman and the men in the tower.
An astronomical check by Professor Hynek ruled out stars, fireballs,
and comets—a vain hope, to begin with. The only other conventional
answer, as the Project report later stated, was hallucination. In view
of all the testimony, hallucination had to he ruled out. Finally, the
investigators admitted they had no solution.
The first Project “Saucer” report, on April 27, 1949, left the Gorman
“mystery light” unidentified.
In the _Saturday Evening Post_ of May 7, 1949, Sidney Shallett analyzed
the Gorman case, in the second of his articles on flying saucers.
Shallet suggested this solution: that Gorman had chased one of the
Navy’s giant cosmic-ray research balloons. Each of these huge balloons
is lighted, so that night-flying planes will not collide with the gas
bag or the instrument case suspended below. Shallett concluded that
Gorman was suffering from a combination of vertigo and confusion with
the light on the balloon.
As already mentioned, these huge Navy balloons are filled with only a
small amount of helium before their release at Minneapolis. They then
rise swiftly to very high altitudes, unless a leak develops. In
Shallett’s words, “These balloons travel high and fast. . . .”
Fargo is about two hundred miles from Minneapolis. Normally, a
cosmic-ray research balloon would have reached a very high altitude by
the time it had drifted this far. The only possible answer to its
low-altitude sighting would be a serious leak.
If a leaking balloon had come down to one thousand feet at Fargo, it
would either have remained at that height or kept on descending. The
mystery light was observed at this altitude moving at high speed. If a
Cub’s outline was visible against the lighted football field, the
massive shape of even a partly deflated balloon would have stood out
like an elephant. Even before release, the partially inflated gas bags
are almost a hundred feet tall. The crowd at the football game would
certainly have seen such a monstrous shape above the glare of the
floodlights, for the plastic balloons gleam brightly in any light rays.
The two C.A.A. men, watching with binoculars, could not possibly have
missed it.
For the cosmic-balloon answer to be correct, this leaking gas bag would
have had to rise swiftly to seventeen thousand feet—after a loss of
helium had forced it down to one thousand. As a balloon pilot, I know
this is impossible. The Project “Saucer” report said unequivocally:
“The object could outturn and outspeed the F-51, and was able to attain
a much steeper climb and to maintain a constant rate of climb far in
excess of the Air Force fighter.”
A leaking balloon? More and more, I became convinced that Secretary
Forrestal had persuaded some editors that it was their patriotic duty
to conceal the answer, whatever it was.
That thought had begun to worry me, because of my part in this
investigation. Perhaps John Steele had been right, and we shouldn’t be
trying to dig out the answer. But I had already told Purdy, and he had
agreed, that if national security was involved, we would drop the thing
completely.
By the time I had proved the balloon answer wrong, I was badly puzzled.
The idea of a disembodied light was the hardest thing to swallow that
I’d come across so far.
And yet there were the other light reports—the strange sighting at
Fairfield Suisan Field, the weird green lights at Las Vegas and
Albuquerque. And there was the encounter that Lieutenant H. G. Combs
had had one night above Andrews Field, near Washington, D. C.
This incident had occurred on November 18, 1948, six weeks after
Gorman’s experience. Combs, flying with another lieutenant named
Jackson, was about to land his T-6, at 9:45 P.M., when a strange object
loomed up near him. It looked like a grayish globe, and it gave off an
odd, fuzzy light.
Combs chased the weird object for over ten minutes, during which it
appeared to evade every move he made. Once, its speed was nearly six
hundred miles an hour, as closely as he could estimate. In a final
attempt to identify it, Combs zoomed the T-6 up at a steep angle and
flashed his landing lights on it. Before he could get a good look, the
globe light whirled off to the east and vanished.
Since Combs’s story had been in the newspapers, Project “Saucer”
evidently had felt in wise to give some explanation. When I read it, in
the preliminary report, I was amazed. Here was the concluding sentence:
“The mystery was cleared up when the object was identified positively
as a cluster of cosmic-ray research balloons.”
Even one of the giant balloons would have been hard to take as the
explanation. Combs was almost sure to have collided with it in his
head-on passes. But an entire cluster! I tried to picture the T-6
zooming and twisting through the night sky, with several huge balloons
in its path. It would be a miracle if Combs got through without hitting
one of them, even if each balloon was lighted. But he had seen only one
light; so had Lieutenant Jackson. That would mean all the rest of the
balloons were unlighted—an unbelievable coincidence.
It was not until months afterward that I found Project “Saucer” had
withdrawn this “solution.” In its final report, this case, Number 207,
was listed in the “Unidentified” group. How the balloon-cluster
explanation ever got into the first report is still a mystery.
When I talked with Gorman, I told him I was baffled by the idea of a
light maneuvering through the skies with no airfoil to support it.
“I know,” he said. “It got me, too, at first.”
“You mean you know the answer?” I demanded.
“It’s just my personal opinion,” said Gorman. “But I’d rather not have
it printed. You see, I got some ideas from all the questions those
Project teams asked me. If my hunch turns out to be right, I might be
talking about an official secret.”
I tried to pry some hint out of him, but Gorman just smiled and shook
his head.
“I can tell you this much,” he said, “because it’s been mentioned in
print. There was _thought_ behind every move the light made. It wasn’t
any radar-responder gadget making it veer away from my ship.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it reacted differently at different times. If it had been a
mechanical control, it would have turned or climbed the same way each
time I got near it. Instead, it was as if some intelligent mind was
directing every turn like a game of chess, and always one move ahead of
me. Maybe you can figure out the rest.”
That was all I could get out of him. It bothered me, because Combs’s
report indicated the same thing. I had a strong temptation to skip the
space-plans research and tell Redell what Gorman had told me. But
Redell had an orderly mind, and he didn’t like to be pushed.
Reluctantly, I gave up the idea. I had a feeling Redell knew the answer
to the mystery lights, and it wasn’t easy to put off the solution.
The letter that came from Art Green, while I was working on the space
plans, didn’t make it easier:
Dear Keyhoe:
Just heard about your Seattle visit. That Fairfield Suisan thing is on
the level; several Air Force pilots have told me about it.
When you get to Fargo, ask Gorman what they found when they checked his
ship with a Geiger counter. If he says it was negative, then he must be
under orders. I happen to know better.
Yours,
ART GREEN