At exactly midnight on September 18, 1954, my telephone rang. It was
Jim Phalen, a friend of mine from the Long Beach _Press-Telegram_,
and he had a "good flying saucer report," hot off the wires. He read
it to me. The lead line was: "Thousands of people saw a huge fireball
light up dark New Mexico skies tonight."
The story went on to tell about how a "blinding green" fireball the
size of a full moon had silently streaked southeast across Colorado
and northern New Mexico at eight-forty that night. Thousands of
people had seen the fireball. It had passed right over a crowded
football stadium at Santa Fe, New Mexico, and people in Denver said
it "turned night into day." The crew of a TWA airliner flying into
Albuquerque from Amarillo, Texas, saw it. Every police and newspaper
switchboard in the two-state area was jammed with calls.
One of the calls was from a man inquiring if anything unusual had
happened recently. When he was informed about the mysterious fireball
he heaved an audible sigh of relief, "Thanks," he said, "I was afraid
I'd gotten some bad bourbon." And he hung up.
Dr. Lincoln La Paz, world-famous authority on meteorites and head of
the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics, apparently
took the occurrence calmly. The wire story said he had told a
reporter that he would plot its course, try to determine where it
landed, and go out and try to find it. "But," he said, "I don't
expect to find anything."
When Jim Phalen had read the rest of the report he asked, "What was
it?"
"It sounds to me like the green fireballs are back," I answered.
"What the devil are green fireballs?"
What the devil _are_ green fireballs? I'd like to know. So would a
lot of other people.
The green fireballs streaked into UFO history late in November 1948,
when people around Albuquerque, New Mexico, began to report seeing
mysterious "green flares" at night. The first reports mentioned only
a "green streak in the sky," low on the horizon. From the description
the Air Force Intelligence people at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque and
the Project Sign people at ATIC wrote the objects off as flares.
After all, thousands of GI's had probably been discharged with a
duffel bag full of "liberated" Very pistols and flares.
But as days passed the reports got better. They seemed to indicate
that the "flares" were getting larger and more people were reporting
seeing them. It was doubtful if this "growth" was psychological
because there had been no publicity--so the Air Force decided to
reconsider the "flare" answer. They were in the process of doing this
on the night of December 5, 1948, a memorable night in the green
fireball chapter of UFO history.
At 9:27P.M. on December 5, an Air Force C-47 transport was flying at
18,000 feet 10 miles east of Albuquerque. The pilot was a Captain
Goede. Suddenly the crew, Captain Goede, his co-pilot, and his
engineer were startled by a green ball of fire flashing across the
sky ahead of them. It looked something like a huge meteor except that
it was a bright green color and it didn't arch downward, as meteors
usually do. The green-colored ball of fire had started low, from near
the eastern slopes of the Sandia Mountains, arched upward a little,
then seemed to level out. And it was too big for a meteor, at least
it was larger than any meteor that anyone in the C-47 had ever seen
before. After a hasty discussion the crew decided that they'd better
tell somebody about it, especially since they had seen an identical
object twenty-two minutes before near Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Captain Goede picked up his microphone and called the control tower
at Kirtland AFB and reported what he and his crew had seen. The tower
relayed the message to the local intelligence people.
A few minutes later the captain of Pioneer Airlines Flight 63 called
Kirtland Tower. At 9:35P.M. he had also seen a green ball of fire
just east of Las Vegas, New Mexico. He was on his way to Albuquerque
and would make a full report when he landed.
When he taxied his DC-3 up to the passenger ramp at Kirtland a few
minutes later, several intelligence officers were waiting for him. He
reported that at 9:35P.M. he was on a westerly heading, approaching
Las Vegas from the east, when he and his co-pilot saw what they first
thought was a "shooting star." It was ahead and a little above them.
But, the captain said, it took them only a split second to realize
that whatever they saw was too low and had too flat a trajectory to
be a meteor. As they watched, the object seemed to approach their
airplane head on, changing color from orange red to green. As it
became bigger and bigger, the captain said, he thought sure it was
going to collide with them so he racked the DC-3 up in a tight turn.
As the green ball of fire got abreast of them it began to fall toward
the ground, getting dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared. Just
before he swerved the DC-3, the fireball was as big, or bigger, than
a full moon.
The intelligence officers asked a few more questions and went back
to their office. More reports, which had been phoned in from all over
northern New Mexico, were waiting for them. By morning a full-fledged
investigation was under way.
No matter what these green fireballs were, the military was getting
a little edgy. They might be common meteorites, psychologically
enlarged flares, or true UFO's, but whatever they were they were
playing around in one of the most sensitive security areas in the
United States. Within 100 miles of Albuquerque were two installations
that were the backbone of the atomic bomb program, Los Alamos and
Sandia Base. Scattered throughout the countryside were other
installations vital to the defense of the U.S.: radar stations,
fighter-interceptor bases, and the other mysterious areas that had
been blocked off by high chain-link fences.
Since the green fireballs bore some resemblance to meteors or
meteorites, the Kirtland intelligence officers called in Dr. Lincoln
La Paz.
Dr. La Paz said that he would be glad to help, so the officers
explained the strange series of events to him. True, he said, the
description of the fireballs did sound as if they might be meteorites
--except for a few points. One way to be sure was to try to plot the
flight path of the green fireballs the same way he had so
successfully plotted the flight path of meteorites in the past. From
this flight path he could determine where they would have hit the
earth--if they were meteorites. They would search this area, and if
they found parts of a meteorite they would have the answer to the
green fireball riddle.
The fireball activity on the night of December 5 was made to order
for plotting flight paths. The good reports of that night included
carefully noted locations, the directions in which the green objects
were seen, their heights above the horizon, and the times when they
were observed. So early the next morning Dr. La Paz and a crew of
intelligence officers were scouring northern New Mexico. They started
out by talking to the people who had made reports but soon found out
that dozens of other people had also seen the fireballs. By closely
checking the time of the observations, they determined that eight
separate fireballs had been seen. One was evidently more spectacular
and was seen by the most people. Everyone in northern New Mexico had
seen it going from west to east, so Dr. La Paz and his crew worked
eastward across New Mexico to the west border of Texas, talking to
dozens of people. After many sleepless hours they finally plotted
where it should have struck the earth. They searched the area but
found nothing. They went back over the area time and time again--
nothing. As Dr. La Paz later told me, this was the first time that he
seriously doubted the green fireballs were meteorites.
Within a few more days the fireballs were appearing almost nightly.
The intelligence officers from Kirtland decided that maybe they could
get a good look at one of them, so on the night of December 8 two
officers took off in an airplane just before dark and began to cruise
around north of Albuquerque. They had a carefully worked out plan
where each man would observe certain details if they saw one of the
green fireballs. At 6:33P.M. they saw one. This is their report:
At 6:33P.M. while flying at an indicated altitude of 11,500 feet, a
strange phenomenon was observed. Exact position of the aircraft at
time of the observation was 20 miles east of the Las Vegas, N.M.,
radio range station. The aircraft was on a compass course of 90
degrees. Capt. ------ was pilot and I was acting as copilot. I first
observed the object and a split second later the pilot saw it. It was
2,000 feet higher than the plane, and was approaching the plane at a
rapid rate of speed from 30 degrees to the left of our course. The
object was similar in appearance to a burning green flare, the kind
that is commonly used in the Air Force. However, the light was much
more intense and the object appeared considerably larger than a
normal flare. The trajectory of the object, when first sighted, was
almost flat and parallel to the earth. The phenomenon lasted about 2
seconds. At the end of this time the object seemed to begin to burn
out and the trajectory then dropped off rapidly. The phenomenon was
of such intensity as to be visible from the very moment it ignited.
Back at Wright-Patterson AFB, ATIC was getting a blow-by-blow
account of the fireball activity but they were taking no direct part
in the investigation. Their main interest was to review all incoming
UFO reports and see if the green fireball reports were actually
unique to the Albuquerque area. They were. Although a good many UFO
reports were coming in from other parts of the U.S., none fit the
description of the green fireballs.
All during December 1948 and January 1949 the green fireballs
continued to invade the New Mexico skies. Everyone, including the
intelligence officers at Kirtland AFB, Air Defense Command people,
Dr. La Paz, and some of the most distinguished scientists at Los
Alamos had seen at least one.
In mid-February 1949 a conference was called at Los Alamos to
determine what should be done to further pursue the investigation.
The Air Force, Project Sign, the intelligence people at Kirtland, and
other interested parties had done everything they could think of and
still no answer.
Such notable scientists as Dr. Joseph Kaplan, a world-renowned
authority on the physics of the upper atmosphere, Dr. Edward Teller,
of H-bomb fame, and of course Dr. La Paz, attended, along with a lot
of military brass and scientists from Los Alamos.
This was one conference where there was no need to discuss whether
or not this special type of UFO, the green fireball, existed. Almost
everyone at the meeting had seen one. The purpose of the conference
was to decide whether the fireballs were natural or man-made and how
to find out more about them.
As happens in any conference, opinions were divided. Some people
thought the green fireballs were natural fireballs. The proponents of
the natural meteor, or meteorite, theory presented facts that they
had dug out of astronomical journals. Greenish-colored meteors,
although not common, had been observed on many occasions. The flat
trajectory, which seemed to be so important in proving that the green
fireballs were extraterrestrial, was also nothing new. When viewed
from certain angles, a meteor can appear to have a flat trajectory.
The reason that so many had been seen during December of 1948 and
January of 1949 was that the weather had been unusually clear all
over the Southwest during this period.
Dr. La Paz led the group who believed that the green fireballs were
not meteors or meteorites. His argument was derived from the facts
that he had gained after many days of research and working with Air
Force intelligence teams. He stuck to the points that (1) the
trajectory was too flat, (2) the color was too green, and (3) he
couldn't locate any fragments even though he had found the spots
where they should have hit the earth if they were meteorites.
People who were at that meeting have told me that Dr. La Paz's
theory was very interesting and that each point was carefully
considered. But evidently it wasn't conclusive enough because when
the conference broke up, after two days, it was decided that the
green fireballs were a natural phenomenon of some kind. It was
recommended that this phase of the UFO investigation be given to the
Air Force's Cambridge Research Laboratory, since it is the function
of this group to study natural phenomena, and that Cambridge set up a
project to attempt to photograph the green fireballs and measure
their speed, altitude, and size.
In the late summer of 1949, Cambridge established Project Twinkle to
solve the mystery. The project called for establishing three
cinetheodolite stations near White Sands, New Mexico. A
cinetheodolite is similar to a 35-mm. movie camera except when you
take a photograph of an object you also get a photograph of three
dials that show the time the photo was taken, the azimuth angle, and
the elevation angle of the camera. If two or more cameras photograph
the same object, it is possible to obtain a very accurate measurement
of the photographed object's altitude, speed, and size.
Project Twinkle was a bust. Absolutely nothing was photographed. Of
the three cameras that were planned for the project, only one was
available. This one camera was continually being moved from place to
place. If several reports came from a certain area, the camera crew
would load up their equipment and move to that area, always arriving
too late. Any duck hunter can tell you that this is the wrong tactic;
if you want to shoot any ducks pick a good place and stay put, let
the ducks come to you.
The people trying to operate Project Twinkle were having financial
and morale trouble. To do a good job they needed more and better
equipment and more people, but Air Force budget cuts precluded this.
Moral support was free but they didn't get this either.
When the Korean War started, Project Twinkle silently died, along
with official interest in green fireballs.
When I organized Project Blue Book in the summer of 1951 I'd never
heard of a green fireball. We had a few files marked "Los Alamos
Conference," "Fireballs," "Project Twinkle," etc., but I didn't pay
any attention to them.
Then one day I was at a meeting in Los Angeles with several other
officers from ATIC, and was introduced to Dr. Joseph Kaplan. When he
found we were from ATIC, his first question was, "What ever happened
to the green fireballs?" None of us had ever heard of them, so he
quickly gave us the story. He and I ended up discussing green
fireballs. He mentioned Dr. La Paz and his opinion that the green
fireballs might be man-made, and although he respected La Paz's
professional ability, he just wasn't convinced. But he did strongly
urge me to get in touch with Dr. La Paz and hear his side of the story.
When I returned to ATIC I spent several days digging into our
collection of green fireball reports. All of these reports covered a
period from early December 1948 to 1949. As far as Blue Book's files
were concerned, there hadn't been a green fireball report for a year
and a half.
I read over the report on Project Twinkle and the few notes we had
on the Los Alamos Conference, and decided that the next time I went
to Albuquerque I'd contact Dr. La Paz. I did go to Albuquerque
several times but my visits were always short and I was always in a
hurry so I didn't get to see him.
It was six or eight months later before the subject of green
fireballs came up again. I was eating lunch with a group of people at
the AEC's Los Alamos Laboratory when one of the group mentioned the
mysterious kelly-green balls of fire. The strictly unofficial bull-
session-type discussion that followed took up the entire lunch hour
and several hours of the afternoon. It was an interesting discussion
because these people, all scientists and technicians from the lab,
had a few educated guesses as to what they might be. All of them had
seen a green fireball, some of them had seen several.
One of the men, a private pilot, had encountered a fireball one
night while he was flying his Navion north of Santa Fe and he had a
vivid way of explaining what he'd seen. "Take a soft ball and paint
it with some kind of fluorescent paint that will glow a bright green
in the dark," I remember his saying, "then have someone take the ball
out about 100 feet in front of you and about 10 feet above you. Have
him throw the ball right at your face, as hard as he can throw it.
That's what a green fireball looks like."
The speculation about what the green fireballs were ran through the
usual spectrum of answers, a new type of natural phenomenon, a secret
U.S. development, and psychologically enlarged meteors. When the
possibility of the green fireballs' being associated with
interplanetary vehicles came up, the whole group got serious. They
had been doing a lot of thinking about this, they said, and they had
a theory.
The green fireballs, they theorized, could be some type of unmanned
test vehicle that was being projected into our atmosphere from a
"spaceship" hovering several hundred miles above the earth. Two years
ago I would have been amazed to hear a group of reputable scientists
make such a startling statement. Now, however, I took it as a matter
of course. I'd heard the same type of statement many times before
from equally qualified groups.
Turn the tables, they said, suppose that we are going to try to go
to a far planet. There would be three phases to the trip: out through
the earth's atmosphere, through space, and the re-entry into the
atmosphere of the planet we're planning to land on. The first two
phases would admittedly present formidable problems, but the last
phase, the re-entry phase, would be the most critical. Coming in from
outer space, the craft would, for all practical purposes, be similar
to a meteorite except that it would be powered and not free-falling.
You would have myriad problems associated with aerodynamic heating,
high aerodynamic loadings, and very probably a host of other problems
that no one can now conceive of. Certain of these problems could be
partially solved by laboratory experimentation, but nothing can
replace flight testing, and the results obtained by flight tests in
our atmosphere would not be valid in another type of atmosphere. The
most logical way to overcome this difficulty would be to build our
interplanetary vehicle, go to the planet that we were interested in
landing on, and hover several hundred miles up. From this altitude we
could send instrumented test vehicles down to the planet. If we
didn't want the inhabitants of the planet, if it were inhabited, to
know what we were doing we could put destruction devices in the test
vehicle, or arrange the test so that the test vehicles would just
plain burn up at a certain point due to aerodynamic heating.
They continued, each man injecting his ideas.
Maybe the green fireballs are test vehicles--somebody else's. The
regular UFO reports might be explained by the fact that the manned
vehicles were venturing down to within 100,000 or 200,000 feet of the
earth, or to the altitude at which atmosphere re-entry begins to get
critical.
I had to go down to the airstrip to get a CARCO Airlines plane back
to Albuquerque so I didn't have time to ask a lot of questions that
came into my mind. I did get to make one comment. From the
conversations, I assumed that these people didn't think the green
fireballs were any kind of a natural phenomenon. Not exactly, they
said, but so far the evidence that said they were a natural
phenomenon was vastly outweighed by the evidence that said they
weren't.
During the kidney-jolting trip down the valley from Los Alamos to
Albuquerque in one of the CARCO Airlines' Bonanzas, I decided that
I'd stay over an extra day and talk to Dr. La Paz.
He knew every detail there was to know about the green fireballs. He
confirmed my findings, that the genuine green fireballs were no
longer being seen. He said that he'd received hundreds of reports,
especially after he'd written several articles about the mysterious
fireballs, but that all of the reported objects were just greenish-
colored, common, everyday meteors.
Dr. La Paz said that some people, including Dr. Joseph Kaplan and
Dr. Edward Teller, thought that the green fireballs were natural
meteors. He didn't think so, however, for several reasons. First the
color was so much different. To illustrate his point, Dr. La Paz
opened his desk drawer and took out a well-worn chart of the color
spectrum. He checked off two shades of green; one a pale, almost
yellowish green and the other a much more distinct vivid green. He
pointed to the bright green and told me that this was the color of
the green fireballs. He'd taken this chart with him when he went out
to talk to people who had seen the green fireballs and everyone had
picked this one color. The pale green, he explained, was the color
reported in the cases of documented green meteors.
Then there were other points of dissimilarity between a meteor and
the green fireballs. The trajectory of the fireballs was too flat.
Dr. La Paz explained that a meteor doesn't necessarily have to arch
down across the sky, its trajectory can appear to be flat, but not as
flat as that of the green fireballs. Then there was the size. Almost
always such descriptive words as "terrifying," "as big as the moon,"
and "blinding" had been used to describe the fireballs. Meteors just
aren't this big and bright.
No--Dr. La Paz didn't think that they were meteors.
Dr. La Paz didn't believe that they were meteorites either.
A meteorite is accompanied by sound and shock waves that break
windows and stampede cattle. Yet in every case of a green fireball
sighting the observers reported that they did not hear any sound.
But the biggest mystery of all was the fact that no particles of a
green fireball had ever been found. If they were meteorites, Dr. La
Paz was positive that he would have found one. He'd missed very few
times in the cases of known meteorites. He pulled a map out of his
file to show me what he meant. It was a map that he had used to plot
the spot where a meteorite had hit the earth. I believe it was in
Kansas. The map had been prepared from information he had obtained
from dozens of people who had seen the meteorite come flaming toward
the earth. At each spot where an observer was standing he'd drawn in
the observer's line of sight to the meteorite. From the dozens of
observers he had obtained dozens of lines of sight. The lines all
converged to give Dr. La Paz a plot of the meteorite's downward
trajectory. Then he had been able to plot the spot where it had
struck the earth. He and his crew went to the marked area, probed the
ground with long steel poles, and found the meteorite.
This was just one case that he showed me. He had records of many
more similar successful expeditions in his file.
Then he showed me some other maps. The plotted lines looked
identical to the ones on the map I'd just seen. Dr. La Paz had used
the same techniques on these plots and had marked an area where he
wanted to search. He had searched the area many times but he had
never found anything.
These were plots of the path of a green fireball.
When Dr. La Paz had finished, I had one last question, "What do you
think they are?"
He weighed the question for a few seconds--then he said that all he
cared to say was that he didn't think that they were a natural
phenomenon. He thought that maybe someday one would hit the earth and
the mystery would be solved. He hoped that they were a natural
phenomenon.
After my talk with Dr. La Paz I can well understand his apparent
calmness on the night of September 18, 1954, when the newspaper
reporter called him to find out if he planned to investigate this
latest green fireball report. He was speaking from experience, not
indifference, when he said, "But I don't expect to find anything."
If the green fireballs are back, I hope that Dr. La Paz gets an
answer this time.
The story of the UFO now goes back to late January 1949, the time
when the Air Force was in the midst of the green fireball mystery. In
another part of the country another odd series of events was taking
place. The center of activity was a highly secret area that can't be
named, and the recipient of the UFO's, which were formations of
little lights, was the U.S. Army.
The series of incidents started when military patrols who were
protecting the area began to report seeing formations of lights
flying through the night sky. At first the lights were reported every
three or four nights, but inside of two weeks the frequency had
stepped up. Before long they were a nightly occurrence. Some patrols
reported that they had seen three or four formations in one night.
The sightings weren't restricted to the men on patrol. One night,
just at dusk, during retreat, the entire garrison watched a formation
pass directly over the post parade ground.
As usual with UFO reports, the descriptions of the lights varied but
the majority of the observers reported a V formation of three lights.
As the formation moved through the sky, the lights changed in color
from a bluish white to orange and back to bluish white. This color
cycle took about two seconds. The lights usually traveled from west
to east and made no sound. They didn't streak across the sky like a
meteor, but they were "going faster than a jet." The lights were "a
little bigger than the biggest star." Once in a while the GI's would
get binoculars on them but they couldn't see any more details. The
lights just looked bigger.
From the time of the first sighting, reports of the little lights
were being sent to the Air Force through Army Intelligence channels.
The reports were getting to ATIC, but the green fireball activity was
taking top billing and no comments went back to the Army about their
little lights. According to an Army G-2 major to whom I talked in the
Pentagon, this silence was taken to mean that no action, other than
sending in reports, was necessary on the part of the Army.
But after about two weeks of nightly sightings and no apparent
action by the Air Force, the commander of the installation decided to
take the initiative and set a trap. His staff worked out a plan in
record time. Special UFO patrols would be sent out into the security
area and they would be furnished with sighting equipment. This could
be the equipment that they normally used for fire control. Each
patrol would be sent to a specific location and would set up a
command post. Operating out of the command post, at points where the
sky could be observed, would be sighting teams. Each team had
sighting equipment to measure the elevation and azimuth angle of the
UFO. Four men were to be on each team, an instrument man, a timer, a
recorder, and a radio operator. All the UFO patrols would be assigned
special radio frequencies.
The operating procedure would be that when one sighting team spotted
a UFO the radio operator would call out his team's location, the
location of the UFO in the sky, and the direction it was going. All
of the other teams from his patrol would thus know when to look for
the UFO and begin to sight on it. While the radio man was reporting,
the instrument man on the team would line up the UFO and begin to
call out the angles of elevation and azimuth. The timer would call
out the time; the recorder would write all of this down. The command
post, upon hearing the report of the UFO, would call the next patrol
and tell them. They too would try to pick it up.
Here was an excellent opportunity to get some concrete data on at
least one type of UFO. It was something that should have been done
from the start. Speeds, altitudes, and sizes that are estimated just
by looking at a UFO are miserably inaccurate. But if you could
accurately establish that some type of object was traveling 30,000
miles an hour--or even 3,000 miles an hour--through our atmosphere,
the UFO story would be the biggest story since the Creation.
The plan seemed foolproof and had the full support of every man who
was to participate. For the first time in history every GI wanted to
get on the patrols. The plan was quickly written up as a field order,
approved, and mimeographed. Since the Air Force had the prime
responsibility for the UFO investigation, it was decided that the
plan should be quickly co-ordinated with the Air Force, so a copy was
rushed to them. Time was critical because every group of nightly
reports might be the last. Everything was ready to roll the minute
the Air Force said "Go."
The Air Force didn't O.K. the plan. I don't know where the plan was
killed, or who killed it, but it was killed. Its death caused two
reactions.
Many people thought that the plan was killed so that too many people
wouldn't find out the truth about UFO's. Others thought somebody was
just plain stupid. Neither was true. The answer was simply that the
official attitude toward UFO's had drastically changed in the past
few months. They didn't exist, they couldn't exist. It was the belief
at ATIC that the one last mystery, the green fireballs, had been
solved a few days before at Los Alamos. The fireballs were meteors
and Project Twinkle would prove it. Any further investigation by the
Army would be a waste of time and effort.
This drastic change in official attitude is as difficult to explain
as it was difficult for many people who knew what was going on inside
Project Sign to believe. I use the words "official attitude" because
at this time UFO's had become as controversial a subject as they are
today. All through intelligence circles people had chosen sides and
the two UFO factions that exist today were born.
On one side was the faction that still believed in flying saucers.
These people, come hell or high water, were hanging on to their
original ideas. Some thought that the UFO's were interplanetary
spaceships. Others weren't quite as bold and just believed that a
good deal more should be known about the UFO's before they were so
completely written off. These people weren't a bunch of nuts or
crackpots either. They ranged down through the ranks from generals
and top-grade civilians. On the outside their views were backed up by
civilian scientists.
On the other side were those who didn't believe in flying saucers.
At one time many of them had been believers. When the UFO reports
were pouring in back in 1947 and 1948, they were just as sure that
the UFO's were real as the people they were now scoffing at. But they
had changed their minds. Some of them had changed their minds because
they had seriously studied the UFO reports and just couldn't see any
evidence that the UFO's were real. But many of them could see the "I
don't believe" band wagon pulling out in front and just jumped on.
This change in the operating policy of the UFO project was so
pronounced that I, like so many other people, wondered if there was a
hidden reason for the change. Was it actually an attempt to go
underground--to make the project more secretive? Was it an effort to
cover up the fact that UFO's were proven to be interplanetary and
that this should be withheld from the public at all cost to prevent a
mass panic? The UFO files are full of references to the near mass
panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous
"The War of the Worlds" broadcast.
This period of "mind changing" bothered me. Here were people
deciding that there was nothing to this UFO business right at a time
when the reports seemed to be getting better. From what I could see,
if there was any mind changing to be done it should have been the
other way, skeptics should have been changing to believers.
Maybe I was just playing the front man to a big cover-up. I didn't
like it because if somebody up above me knew that UFO's were really
spacecraft, I could make a big fool out of myself if the truth came
out. I checked into this thoroughly. I spent a lot of time talking to
people who had worked on Project Grudge.
The anti-saucer faction was born because of an old psychological
trait, people don't like to be losers. To be a loser makes one feel
inferior and incompetent. On September 23, 1947, when the chief of
ATIC sent a letter to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces
stating that UFO's were real, intelligence committed themselves. They
had to prove it. They tried for a year and a half with no success.
Officers on top began to get anxious and the press began to get
anxious. They wanted an answer. Intelligence had tried one answer,
the then Top Secret Estimate of the Situation that "proved" that
UFO's were real, but it was kicked back. The people on the UFO
project began to think maybe the brass didn't consider them too sharp
so they tried a new hypothesis: UFO's don't exist. In no time they
found that this was easier to prove and it got recognition. Before if
an especially interesting UFO report came in and the Pentagon wanted
an answer, all they'd get was an "It could be real but we can't prove
it." Now such a request got a quick, snappy "It was a balloon," and
feathers were stuck in caps from ATIC up to the Pentagon. Everybody
felt fine.
In early 1949 the term "new look" was well known. The new look in
women's fashions was the lower hemlines, in automobiles it was longer
lines. In UFO circles the new look was cuss 'em.
The new look in UFO's was officially acknowledged on February 11,
1949, when an order was written that changed the name of the UFO
project from Project Sign to Project Grudge. The order was supposedly
written because the classified name, Project Sign, had been
compromised. This was always my official answer to any questions
about the name change. I'd go further and say that the names of the
projects, first Sign, then Grudge, had no significance. This wasn't
true, they did have significance, a lot of it.