On September 23, 1947, the chief of the Air Technical Intelligence
Center, one of the Air Force's most highly specialized intelligence
units, sent a letter to the Commanding General of the then Army Air
Forces.
The letter was in answer to the Commanding General's verbal request
to make a preliminary study of the reports of unidentified flying
objects. The letter said that after a preliminary study of UFO
reports, ATIC concluded that, to quote from the letter, "the reported
phenomena were real." The letter strongly urged that a permanent
project be established at ATIC to investigate and analyze future UFO
reports. It requested a priority for the project, a registered code
name, and an over-all security classification. ATICs request was
granted and Project Sign, the forerunner of Project Grudge and
Project Blue Book, was launched. It was given a 2A priority, 1A being
the highest priority an Air Force project could have. With this the
Air Force dipped into the most prolonged and widespread controversy
it has ever, or may ever, encounter. The Air Force grabbed the
proverbial bear by the tail and to this day it hasn't been able to
let loose.
The letter to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces from the
chief of ATIC had used the word "phenomena." History has shown that
this was not a too well-chosen word. But on September 23, 1947, when
the letter was written, ATICs intelligence specialists were confident
that within a few months or a year they would have the answer to the
question, "What are UFO's?" The question, "Do UFO's exist?" was never
mentioned. The only problem that confronted the people at ATIC was,
"Were the UFO's of Russian or interplanetary origin?" Either case
called for a serious, secrecy-shrouded project. Only top people at
ATIC were assigned to Project Sign.
Although a formal project for UFO investigation wasn't set up until
September 1947, the Air Force had been vitally interested in UFO
reports ever since June 24, 1947, the day Kenneth Arnold made the
original UFO report.
As Arnold's story of what he saw that day has been handed down by
the bards of saucerism, the true facts have been warped, twisted, and
changed. Even some points in Arnold's own account of his sighting as
published in his book, _The_ _Coming_ _of_ _the_ _Saucers_, do not
jibe with what the official files say he told the Air Force in 1947.
Since this incident was the original UFO sighting, I used to get many
inquiries about it from the press and at briefings. To get the true
and accurate story of what did happen to Kenneth Arnold on June 24,
1947, I had to go back through old newspaper files, official reports,
and talk to people who had worked on Project Sign. By cross-checking
these data and talking to people who had heard Arnold tell about his
UFO sighting soon after it happened, I finally came up with what I
believe is the accurate story.
Arnold had taken off from Chehalis, Washington, intending to fly to
Yakima, Washington. About 3:00P.M. he arrived in the vicinity of
Mount Rainier. There was a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane lost in
the Mount Rainier area, so Arnold decided to fly around awhile and
look for it. He was looking down at the ground when suddenly he
noticed a series of bright flashes off to his left. He looked for the
source of the flashes and saw a string of nine very bright disk-
shaped objects, which he estimated to be 45 to 50 feet in length.
They were traveling from north to south across the nose of his
airplane. They were flying in a reversed echelon (i.e., lead object
high with the rest stepped down), and as they flew along they weaved
in and out between the mountain peaks, once passing behind one of the
peaks. Each individual object had a skipping motion described by
Arnold as a "saucer skipping across water."
During the time that the objects were in sight, Arnold had clocked
their speed. He had marked his position and their position on the map
and again noted the time. When he landed he sketched in the flight
path that the objects had flown and computed their speed, almost
1,700 miles per hour. He estimated that they had been 20 to 25 miles
away and had traveled 47 miles in 102 seconds.
I found that there was a lot of speculation on this report. Two
factions at ATIC had joined up behind two lines of reasoning. One
side said that Arnold had seen plain, everyday jet airplanes flying
in formation. This side's argument was based on the physical
limitations of the human eye, visual acuity, the eye's ability to see
a small, distant object. Tests, they showed, had proved that a person
with normal vision can't "see" an object that subtends an angle of
less than 0.2 second of arc. For example, a basketball can't be seen
at a distance of several miles but if you move the basketball closer
and closer, at some point you will be able to see it. At this point
the angle between the top and bottom of the ball and your eye will be
about 0.2 of a second of arc. This was applied to Arnold's sighting.
The "Arnold-saw-airplanes" faction maintained that since Arnold said
that the objects were 45 to 50 feet long they would have had to be
much closer than he had estimated or he couldn't even have seen them
at all. Since they were much closer than he estimated, Arnold's timed
speed was all wrong and instead of going 1,700 miles per hour the
objects were traveling at a speed closer to 400 miles per hour, the
speed of a jet. There was no reason to believe they weren't jets. The
jets appeared to have a skipping motion because Arnold had looked at
them through layers of warm and cold air, like heat waves coming from
a hot pavement that cause an object to shimmer.
The other side didn't buy this idea at all. They based their
argument on the fact that Arnold knew where the objects were when he
timed them.
After all, he was an old mountain pilot and was as familiar with the
area around the Cascade Mountains as he was with his own living room.
To cinch this point the fact that the objects had passed _behind_ a
mountain peak was brought up. This positively established the
distance the objects were from Arnold and confirmed his calculated
1,700-miles-per-hour speed. Besides, no airplane can weave in and out
between mountain peaks in the short time that Arnold was watching
them. The visual acuity factor only strengthened the "Arnold-saw-a-
flying-saucer" faction's theory that what he'd seen was a spaceship.
If he could see the objects 20 to 25 miles away, they must have been
about 210 feet long instead of the poorly estimated 45 to 50 feet.
In 1947 this was a fantastic story, but now it is just another UFO
report marked "Unknown." It is typical in that if the facts are
accurate, if Arnold actually did see the UFO's go _behind_ a mountain
peak, and if he knew his exact position at the time, the UFO problem
cannot be lightly sloughed off; but there are always "ifs" in UFO
reports. This is the type of report that led Major General John A.
Samford, Director of Intelligence for Headquarters, Air Force, to
make the following comment during a press conference in July 1952:
"However, there have remained a percentage of this total [of all UFO
reports received by the Air Force], about 20 per cent of the reports,
that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible
things. We keep on being concerned about them."
In warping, twisting, and changing the Arnold incident, the writers
of saucer lore haven't been content to confine themselves to the
incident itself; they have dragged in the crashed Marine Corps' C-46.
They intimate that the same flying saucers that Arnold saw shot down
the C-46, grabbed up the bodies of the passengers and crew, and now
have them pickled at the University of Venus Medical School. As proof
they apply the same illogical reasoning that they apply to most
everything. The military never released photos of the bodies of the
dead men, therefore there were no bodies. There were photographs and
there were bodies. In consideration of the families of air crewmen
and passengers, photos of air crashes showing dead bodies are never
released.
Arnold himself seems to be the reason for a lot of the excitement
that heralded flying saucers. Stories of odd incidents that occur in
this world are continually being reported by newspapers, but never on
the scale of the first UFO report. Occasional stories of the
"Himalayan snowmen," or the "Malayan monsters," rate only a few
inches or a column on the back pages of newspapers. Arnold's story,
if it didn't make the headlines, at least made the front page. I had
the reason for this explained to me one day when I was investigating
a series of UFO reports in California in the spring of 1952.
I was making my headquarters at an air base where a fighter-bomber
wing was stationed. Through a mutual friend I met one of the fighter-
bomber pilots who had known Arnold. In civilian life the pilot was a
newspaper reporter and had worked on the original Arnold story. He
told me that when the story first broke all the newspaper editors in
the area were thoroughly convinced that the incident was a hoax, and
that they intended to write the story as such. The more they dug into
the facts, however, and into Arnold's reputation, the more it
appeared that he was telling the truth. Besides having an
unquestionable character, he was an excellent mountain pilot, and
mountain pilots are a breed of men who know every nook and cranny of
the mountains in their area. The most fantastic part of Arnold's
story had been the 1,700-miles-per-hour speed computed from Arnold's
timing the objects between two landmarks. "When Arnold told us how he
computed the speed," my chance acquaintance told me, "we all put a
lot of faith in his story." He went on to say that when the editors
found out that they were wrong about the hoax, they did a complete
about-face, and were very much impressed by the story. This
enthusiasm spread, and since the Air Force so quickly denied
ownership of the objects, all of the facts built up into a story so
unique that papers all over the world gave it front-page space.
There was an old theory that maybe Arnold had seen wind whipping
snow along the mountain ridges, so I asked about this. I got a flat
"Impossible." My expert on the early Arnold era said, "I've lived in
the Pacific Northwest many years and have flown in the area for
hundreds of hours. It's impossible to get powder snow low in the
mountains in June. Personally, I believe Arnold saw some kind of
aircraft and they weren't from this earth." He went on to tell me
about two other very similar sightings that had happened the day
after Arnold saw the nine disks. He knew the people who made these
sightings and said that they weren't the kind to go off "half
cocked." He offered to get a T-6 and fly me up to Boise to talk to
them since they had never made a report to the military, but I had to
return to Dayton so I declined.
Within a few days of Arnold's sighting, others began to come in. On
June 28 an Air Force pilot in an F-51 was flying near Lake Mead,
Nevada, when he saw a formation of five or six circular objects off
his right wing. This was about three-fifteen in the afternoon.
That night at nine-twenty, four Air Force officers, two pilots, and
two intelligence officers from Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama,
saw a bright light traveling across the sky. It was first seen just
above the horizon, and as it traveled toward the observers it
"zigzagged," with bursts of high speed. When it was directly overhead
it made a sharp 90-degree turn and was lost from view as it traveled
south.
Other reports came in. In Milwaukee a lady saw ten go over her house
"like blue blazes," heading south. A school bus driver in Clarion,
Iowa, saw an object streak across the sky. In a few seconds twelve
more followed the first one. White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico
chalked up the first of the many sightings that this location would
produce when several people riding in an automobile saw a pulsating
light travel from horizon to horizon in thirty seconds. A Chicago
housewife saw one "with legs."
The week of July 4, 1947, set a record for reports that was not
broken until 1952. The center of activity was the Portland, Oregon,
area. At 11:00A.M. a carload of people driving near Redmond saw four
disk-shaped objects streaking past Mount Jefferson. At 1:05P.M. a
policeman was in the parking lot behind the Portland City Police
Headquarters when he noticed some pigeons suddenly began to flutter
around as if they were scared. He looked up and saw five large disk-
shaped objects, two going south and three going east. They were
traveling at a high rate of speed and seemed to be oscillating about
their lateral axis. Minutes later two other policemen, both ex-
pilots, reported three of the same things flying in trail. Before
long the harbor patrol called into headquarters. A crew of four
patrolmen had seen three to six of the disks, "shaped like chrome hub
caps," traveling very fast. They also oscillated as they flew. Then
the citizens of Portland began to see them. A man saw one going east
and two going north. At four-thirty a woman called in and had just
seen one that looked like "a new dime flipping around." Another man
reported two, one going southeast, one northeast. From Milwaukie,
Oregon, three were reported going northwest. In Vancouver,
Washington, sheriff's deputies saw twenty to thirty.
The first photo was taken on July 4 in Seattle. After much publicity
it turned out to be a weather balloon.
That night a United Airlines crew flying near Emmett, Idaho, saw
five. The pilot's report read:
Five "somethings," which were thin and smooth on the bottom and
rough-appearing on top, were seen silhouetted against the sunset
shortly after the plane took off from Boise at 8:04P.M. We saw them
clearly. We followed them in a northeasterly direction for about 45
miles. They finally disappeared. We were unable to tell whether they
outsped us or disintegrated. We can't say whether they were
"smearlike," oval, or anything else but whatever they were they were
not aircraft, clouds or smoke.
Civilians did not have a corner on the market. On July 6 a staff
sergeant in Birmingham, Alabama, saw several "dim, glowing lights"
speeding across the sky and photographed one of them. Also on the
sixth the crew of an Air Force B-25 saw a bright, disk-shaped object
"low at nine o'clock." This is one of the few reports of an object
lower than the aircraft. At Fairfield-Suisun AFB in California a
pilot saw something travel three quarters of the way across the sky
in a few seconds. It, too, was oscillating on its lateral axis.
According to the old hands at ATIC, the first sighting that really
made the Air Force take a deep interest in UFO's occurred on July 8
at Muroc Air Base (now Edwards AFB), the supersecret Air Force test
center in the Mojave Desert of California. At 10:10A.M. a test pilot
was running up the engine of the then new XP-84 in preparation for a
test flight. He happened to look up and to the north he saw what
first appeared to be a weather balloon traveling in a westerly
direction. After watching it a few seconds, he changed his mind. He
had been briefed on the high-altitude winds, and the object he saw
was going against the wind. Had it been the size of a normal
aircraft, the test pilot estimated that it would have been at 10,000
to 12,000 feet and traveling 200 to 225 miles per hour. He described
the object as being spherically shaped and yellowish white in color.
Ten minutes before this several other officers and airmen had seen
three objects. They were similar except they had more of a silver
color. They were also heading in a westerly direction.
Two hours later a crew of technicians on Rogers Dry Lake, adjacent
to Muroc Air Base, observed another UFO. Their report went as follows:
On the 8 July 1947 at 11:50 we were sitting in an observation truck
located in Area #3, Rogers Dry Lake. We were gazing upward toward a
formation of two P-82's and an A-26 aircraft flying at 20,000 feet.
They were preparing to carry out a seat-ejection experiment. We
observed a round object, white aluminum color, which at first
resembled a parachute canopy. Our first impression was that a
premature ejection of the seat and dummy had occurred but this was
not the case. The object was lower than 20,000 feet, and was falling
at three times the rate observed for the test parachute, which
ejected thirty seconds after we first saw the object. As the object
fell it drifted slightly north of due west against the prevailing
wind. The speed, horizontal motion, could not be determined, but it
appeared to be slower than the maximum velocity F-80 aircraft.
As this object descended through a low enough level to permit
observation of its lateral silhouette, it presented a distinct oval-
shaped outline, with two projections on the upper surface which might
have been thick fins or nobs. These crossed each other at intervals,
suggesting either rotation or oscillation of slow type.
No smoke, flames, propeller arcs, engine noise, or other plausible
or visible means of propulsion were noted. The color was silver,
resembling an aluminum-painted fabric, and did not appear as dense as
a parachute canopy.
When the object dropped to a level such that it came into line of
vision of the mountain tops, it was lost to the vision of the
observers.
It is estimated that the object was in sight about 90 seconds. Of
the five people sitting in the observation truck, four observed this
object.
The following is our opinion about this object:
It was man-made, as evidenced by the outline and functional
appearance.
Seeing this was not a hallucination or other fancies of sense.
Exactly four hours later the pilot of an F-51 was flying at 20,000
feet about 40 miles south of Muroc Air Base when he sighted a "flat
object of a light-reflecting nature." He reported that it had no
vertical fin or wings. When he first saw it, the object was above him
and he tried to climb up to it, but his F-51 would not climb high
enough. All air bases in the area were contacted but they had no
aircraft in the area.
By the end of July 1947 the UFO security lid was down tight. The few
members of the press who did inquire about what the Air Force was
doing got the same treatment that you would get today if you inquired
about the number of thermonuclear weapons stock-piled in the U.S.'s
atomic arsenal. No one, outside of a few high-ranking officers in the
Pentagon, knew what the people in the barbed-wire enclosed Quonset
huts that housed the Air Technical Intelligence Center were thinking
or doing.
The memos and correspondence that Project Blue Book inherited from
the old UFO projects told the story of the early flying saucer era.
These memos and pieces of correspondence showed that the UFO
situation was considered to be serious; in fact, very serious. The
paper work of that period also indicated the confusion that
surrounded the investigation; confusion almost to the point of panic.
The brass wanted an answer, quickly, and people were taking off in
all directions. Everyone's theory was as good as the next and each
person with any weight at ATIC was plugging and investigating his own
theory. The ideas as to the origin of the UFO's fell into two main
categories, earthly and non-earthly. In the earthly category the
Russians led, with the U.S. Navy and their XF-5-U-1, the "Flying
Flapjack," pulling a not too close second. The desire to cover all
leads was graphically pointed up to be a personal handwritten note I
found in a file. It was from ATIC's chief to a civilian intelligence
specialist. It said, "Are you positive that the Navy junked the XF-5-
U-1 project?" The non-earthly category ran the gamut of theories,
with space animals trailing interplanetary craft about the same
distance the Navy was behind the Russians.
This confused speculating lasted only a few weeks. Then the
investigation narrowed down to the Soviets and took off on a much
more methodical course of action.
When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of
aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority of these
projects were in the most preliminary stages but they were the only
known craft that could even approach the performance of the objects
reported by UFO observers. Like the Allies, after World War II the
Soviets had obtained complete sets of data on the latest German
developments. This, coupled with rumors that the Soviets were
frantically developing the German ideas, caused no small degree of
alarm. As more UFO's were observed near the Air Force's Muroc Test
Center, the Army's White Sands Proving Ground, and atomic bomb
plants, ATIC's efforts became more concentrated.
Wires were sent to intelligence agents in Germany requesting that
they find out exactly how much progress had been made on the various
German projects.
The last possibility, of course, was that the Soviets had discovered
some completely new aerodynamic concept that would give saucer
performance.
While ATIC technical analysts were scouring the United States for
data on the German projects and the intelligence agents in Germany
were seeking out the data they had been asked for, UFO reports
continued to flood the country. The Pacific Northwest still led with
the most sightings, but every state in the Union was reporting a few
flying saucers.
At first there was no co-ordinated effort to collect data on the UFO
reports. Leads would come from radio reports or newspaper items.
Military intelligence agencies outside of ATIC were hesitant to
investigate on their own initiative because, as is so typical of the
military, they lacked specific orders. When no orders were
forthcoming, they took this to mean that the military had no interest
in the UFO's. But before long this placid attitude changed, and
changed drastically. Classified orders came down to investigate _all_
UFO sightings. Get every detail and send it direct to ATIC at Wright
Field. The order carried no explanation as to why the information was
wanted. This lack of an explanation and the fact that the information
was to be sent directly to a high-powered intelligence group within
Air Force Headquarters stirred the imagination of every potential
cloak-and-dagger man in the military intelligence system.
Intelligence people in the field who had previously been free with
opinions now clammed up tight.
The era of confusion was progressing.
Early statements to the press, which shaped the opinion of the
public, didn't reduce the confusion factor. While ATIC was grimly
expending maximum effort in a serious study, "certain high-placed
officials" were officially chuckling at the mention of UFO's.
In July 1947 an International News Service wire story quoted the
public relations officer at Wright Field as saying, "So far we
haven't found anything to confirm that saucers exist. We don't think
they are guided missiles." He went on to say, "As things are now,
they appear to be either a phenomenon or a figment of somebody's
imagination."
A few weeks later a lieutenant colonel who was Assistant to the
Chief of Staff of the Fourth Air Force was widely quoted as saying,
"There is no basis for belief in flying saucers in the Tacoma area
[referring to a UFO sighting in the area of Tacoma, Washington], or
any other area."
The "experts," in their stories of saucer lore, have said that these
brush-offs of the UFO sightings were intentional smoke screens to
cover the facts by adding confusion. This is not true; it was merely
a lack of coordination. But had the Air Force tried to throw up a
screen of confusion, they couldn't have done a better job.
When the lieutenant colonel from the Fourth Air Force made his
widely publicized denunciation of saucer believers he specifically
mentioned a UFO report from the Tacoma, Washington, area.
The report of the investigation of this incident, the Maury Island
Mystery, was one of the most detailed reports of the early UFO era.
The report that we had in our files had been pieced together by Air
Force Intelligence and other agencies because the two intelligence
officers who started the investigation couldn't finish it. They were
dead.
For the Air Force the story started on July 31, 1947, when
Lieutenant Frank Brown, an intelligence agent at Hamilton AFB,
California, received a long-distance phone call. The caller was a man
whom 111 call Simpson, who had met Brown when Brown investigated an
earlier UFO sighting, and he had a hot lead on another UFO incident.
He had just talked to two Tacoma Harbor patrolmen. One of them had
seen six UFO's hover over his patrol boat and spew out chunks of odd
metal. Simpson had some of the pieces of the metal.
The story sounded good to Lieutenant Brown, so he reported it to his
chief. His chief OK'd a trip and within an hour Lieutenant Brown and
Captain Davidson were flying to Tacoma in an Air Force B-25. When
they arrived they met Simpson and an airline pilot friend of his in
Simpson's hotel room. After the usual round of introductions Simpson
told Brown and Davidson that he had received a letter from a Chicago
publisher asking him, Simpson, to investigate this case. The
publisher had paid him $200 and wanted an exclusive on the story, but
things were getting too hot, Simpson wanted the military to take over.
Simpson went on to say that he had heard about the experience off
Maury Island but that he wanted Brown and Davidson to hear it
firsthand. He had called the two harbor patrolmen and they were on
their way to the hotel. They arrived and they told their story.
I'll call these two men Jackson and Richards although these aren't
their real names. In June 1947, Jackson said, his crew, his son, and
the son's dog were on his patrol boat patrolling near Maury Island,
an island in Puget Sound, about 3 miles from Tacoma. It was a gray
day, with a solid cloud deck down at about 2,500 feet. Suddenly
everyone on the boat noticed six "doughnut-shaped" objects, just
under the clouds, headed toward the boat. They came closer and
closer, and when they were about 500 feet over the boat they stopped.
One of the doughnut-shaped objects seemed to be in trouble as the
other five were hovering around it. They were close, and everybody
got a good look. The UFO's were about 100 feet in diameter, with the
"hole in the doughnut" being about 25 feet in diameter. They were a
silver color and made absolutely no noise. Each object had large
portholes around the edge.
As the five UFO's circled the sixth, Jackson recalled, one of them
came in and appeared to make contact with the disabled craft. The two
objects maintained contact for a few minutes, then began to separate.
While this was going on, Jackson was taking photos. Just as they
began to separate, there was a dull "thud" and the next second the
UFO began to spew out sheets of very light metal from the hole in the
center. As these were fluttering to the water, the UFO began to throw
out a harder, rocklike material. Some of it landed on the beach of
Maury Island. Jackson took his crew and headed toward the beach of
Maury Island, but not before the boat was damaged, his son's arm had
been injured, and the dog killed. As they reached the island they
looked up and saw that the UFO's were leaving the area at high speed.
The harbor patrolman went on to tell how he scooped up several chunks
of the metal from the beach and boarded the patrol boat. He tried to
use his radio to summon aid, but for some unusual reason the
interference was so bad he couldn't even call the three miles to his
headquarters in Tacoma. When they docked at Tacoma, Jackson got first
aid for his son and then reported to his superior officer, Richards,
who, Jackson added to his story, didn't believe the tale. He didn't
believe it until he went out to the island himself and saw the metal.
Jackson's trouble wasn't over. The next morning a mysterious visitor
told Jackson to forget what he'd seen.
Later that same day the photos were developed. They showed the six
objects, but the film was badly spotted and fogged, as if the film
had been exposed to some kind of radiation.
Then Simpson told about his brush with mysterious callers. He said
that Jackson was not alone as far as mysterious callers were
concerned, the Tacoma newspapers had been getting calls from an
anonymous tipster telling exactly what was going on in Simpson's
hotel room. This was a very curious situation because no one except
Simpson, the airline pilot, and the two harbor patrolmen knew what
was taking place. The room had even been thoroughly searched for
hidden microphones.
That is the way the story stood a few hours after Lieutenant Brown
and Captain Davidson arrived in Tacoma.
After asking Jackson and Richards a few questions, the two
intelligence agents left, reluctant even to take any of the
fragments. As some writers who have since written about this incident
have said, Brown and Davidson seemed to be anxious to leave and
afraid to touch the fragments of the UFO, as if they knew something
more about them. The two officers went to McChord AFB, near Tacoma,
where their B-25 was parked, held a conference with the intelligence
officer at McChord, and took off for their home base, Hamilton. When
they left McChord they had a good idea as to the identity of the
UFO's. Fortunately they told the McChord intelligence officer what
they had determined from their interview.
In a few hours the two officers were dead. The B-25 crashed near
Kelso, Washington. The crew chief and a passenger had parachuted to
safety. The newspapers hinted that the airplane was sabotaged and
that it was carrying highly classified material. Authorities at
McChord AFB confirmed this latter point, the airplane was carrying
classified material.
In a few days the newspaper publicity on the crash died down, and
the Maury Island Mystery was never publicly solved.
Later reports say that the two harbor patrolmen mysteriously
disappeared soon after the fatal crash.
They should have disappeared, into Puget Sound. The whole Maury
Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and
the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history. One passage in the detailed
official report of the Maury Island Mystery says:
Both ------ (the two harbor patrolmen) admitted that the rock
fragments had nothing to do with flying saucers. The whole thing was
a hoax. They had sent in the rock fragments [to a magazine publisher]
as a joke. ------ One of the patrolmen wrote to ------ [the
publisher] stating that the rock could have been part of a flying
saucer. He had said the rock came from a flying saucer because that's
what ------ [the publisher] wanted him to say.
The publisher, mentioned above, who, one of the two hoaxers said,
wanted him to say that the rock fragments had come from a flying
saucer, is the same one who paid the man I called Simpson $200 to
investigate the case.
The report goes on to explain more details of the incident. Neither
one of the two men could ever produce the photos. They "misplaced"
them, they said. One of them, I forget which, was the mysterious
informer who called the newspapers to report the conversations that
were going on in the hotel room. Jackson's mysterious visitor didn't
exist. Neither of the men was a harbor patrolman, they merely owned a
couple of beat-up old boats that they used to salvage floating lumber
from Puget Sound. The airplane crash was one of those unfortunate
things. An engine caught on fire, burned off, and just before the two
pilots could get out, the wing and tail tore off, making it
impossible for them to escape. The two dead officers from Hamilton
AFB smelled a hoax, accounting for their short interview and
hesitancy in bothering to take the "fragments." They confirmed their
convictions when they talked to the intelligence officer at McChord.
It had already been established, through an informer, that the
fragments were what Brown and Davidson thought, slag. The classified
material on the B-25 was a file of reports the two officers offered
to take back to Hamilton and had nothing to do with the Maury Island
Mystery, or better, the Maury Island Hoax.
Simpson and his airline pilot friend weren't told about the hoax for
one reason. As soon as it was discovered that they had been "taken,"
thoroughly, and were not a party to the hoax, no one wanted to
embarrass them.
The majority of the writers of saucer lore have played this sighting
to the hilt, pointing out as their main premise the fact that the
story must be true because the government never openly exposed or
prosecuted either of the two hoaxers. This is a logical premise, but
a false one. The reason for the thorough investigation of the Maury
Island Hoax was that the government had thought seriously of
prosecuting the men. At the last minute it was decided, after talking
to the two men, that the hoax was a harmless joke that had
mushroomed, and that the loss of two lives and a B-25 could not be
directly blamed on the two men. The story wasn't even printed because
at the time of the incident, even though in this case the press knew
about it, the facts were classed as evidence. By the time the facts
were released they were yesterday's news. And nothing is deader than
yesterday's news.
As 1947 drew to a close, the Air Force's Project Sign had outgrown
its initial panic and had settled down to a routine operation. Every
intelligence report dealing with the Germans' World War II
aeronautical research had been studied to find out if the Russians
could have developed any of the late German designs into flying
saucers. Aerodynamicists at ATIC and at Wright Field's Aircraft
Laboratory computed the maximum performance that could be expected
from the German designs. The designers of the aircraft themselves
were contacted. "Could the Russians develop a flying saucer from
their designs?" The answer was, "No, there was no conceivable way any
aircraft could perform that would match the reported maneuvers of the
UFO's." The Air Force's Aeromedical Laboratory concurred. If the
aircraft could be built, the human body couldn't stand the violent
maneuvers that were reported. The aircraft-structures people seconded
this, no material known could stand the loads of the reported
maneuvers and heat of the high speeds.
Still convinced that the UFO's were real objects, the people at ATIC
began to change their thinking. Those who were convinced that the
UFO's were of Soviet origin now began to eye outer space, not because
there was any evidence that the UFO's did come from outer space but
because they were convinced that UFO's existed and only some unknown
race with a highly developed state of technology could build such
vehicles. As far as the effect on the human body was concerned, why
couldn't these people, whoever they might be, stand these horrible
maneuver forces? Why judge them by earthly standards? I found a memo
to this effect was in the old Project Sign files.
Project Sign ended 1947 with a new problem. How do you collect
interplanetary intelligence? During World War II the organization
that was ATIC's forerunner, the Air Materiel Command's secret "T-2,"
had developed highly effective means of wringing out every possible
bit of information about the technical aspects of enemy aircraft.
ATIC knew these methods, but how could this be applied to spaceships?
The problem was tackled with organized confusion.
If the confusion in the minds of Air Force people was organized the
confusion in the minds of the public was not. Publicized statements
regarding the UFO were conflicting.
A widely printed newspaper release, quoting an unnamed Air Force
official in the Pentagon, said:
The "flying saucers" are one of three things:
Solar reflections on low-hanging clouds.
Small meteors that break up, their crystals catching the rays of the
sun.
Icing conditions could have formed large hailstones and they might
have flattened out and glided.
A follow-up, which quoted several scientists, said in essence that
the unnamed Air Force official was crazy. Nobody even heard of
crystallized meteors, or huge, flat hailstones, and the solar-
reflection theory was absurd.
_Life_, _Time_, _Newsweek_, and many other news magazines carried
articles about the UFO's. Some were written with tongue in cheek,
others were not. All the articles mentioned the Air Force's mass-
hysterical induced hallucinations. But a Veterans' Administration
psychiatrist publicly pooh-poohed this. "Too many people are seeing
things," he said.
It was widely suggested that all the UFO's were meteors. Two Chicago
astronomers queered this. Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the
University of Chicago observatory, was quoted as flatly saying the
UFO's couldn't be meteors. "They are probably man-made," he told the
Associated Press. Dr. Oliver Lee, director of Northwestern
University's observatory, agreed with Dr. Kuiper and he threw in an
additional confusion factor that had been in the back of many
people's minds. Maybe they were our own aircraft.
The government had been denying that UFO's belonged to the U.S. from
the first, but Dr. Vannevar Bush, the world-famous scientist, and Dr.
Merle Tuve, inventor of the proximity fuse, added their weight.
"Impossible," they said.
All of this time unnamed Air Force officials were disclaiming
serious interest in the UFO subject. Yet every time a newspaper
reporter went out to interview a person who had seen a UFO,
intelligence agents had already been flown in, gotten the detailed
story complete with sketches of the UFO, and sped back to their base
to send the report to Project Sign. Many people had supposedly been
"warned" not to talk too much. The Air Force was mighty interested in
hallucinations.
Thus 1947 ended with various-sized question marks in the mind of the
public. If you followed flying saucers closely the question mark was
big, if you just noted the UFO story titles in the papers it was
smaller, but it was there and it was growing. Probably none of the
people, military or civilian, who had made the public statements were
at all qualified to do so but they had done it, their comments had
been printed, and their comments had been read. Their comments formed
the question mark.