The Grudge Report was supposedly not for general distribution. A few
copies were sent to the Air Force Press Desk in the Pentagon and
reporters and writers could come in and read it. But a good many
copies did get into circulation. The Air Force Press Room wasn't the
best place to sit and study a 600-page report, and a quick glance at
the report showed that it required some study--if no more than to
find out what the authors were trying to prove--so several dozen
copies got into circulation. I know that these "liberated" copies of
the Grudge Report had been thoroughly studied because nearly every
writer who came to ATIC during the time that I was in charge of
Project Blue Book carried a copy.
Since the press had some questions about the motives behind
releasing the Grudge Report, it received very little publicity while
the writers put out feelers. Consequently in early 1950 you didn't
read much about flying saucers.
Evidently certain people in the Air Force thought this lull in
publicity meant that the UFO's had finally died because Project
Grudge was junked. All the project files, hundreds of pounds of
reports, memos, photos, sketches, and other assorted bits of paper
were unceremoniously yanked out of their filing cabinets, tied up
with string, and chucked into an old storage case. I would guess that
many reports ended up as "souvenirs" because a year later, when I
exhumed these files, there were a lot of reports missing.
About this time the official Air Force UFO project had one last post-
death muscular spasm. The last bundle of reports had just landed on
top of the pile in the storage case when ATIC received a letter from
the Director of Intelligence of the Air Force. In official language
it said, "What gives?" There had been no order to end Project Grudge.
The answer went back that Project Grudge had not been disbanded; the
project functions had been transferred and it was no longer a
"special" project. From now on UFO reports would be processed through
normal intelligence channels along with other intelligence reports.
To show good faith ATIC requested permission to issue a new Air
Force-wide bulletin which was duly mimeographed and disseminated. In
essence it said that Air Force Headquarters had directed ATIC to
continue to collect and evaluate reports of unidentified flying
objects. It went on to explain that most UFO reports were trash. It
pointed out the findings of the Grudge Report in such strong language
that by the time the recipient of the bulletin had finished reading
it, he would be ashamed to send in a report. To cinch the deal the
bulletins must have been disseminated only to troops in Outer
Mongolia because I never found anyone in the field who had ever
received a copy.
As the Air Force UFO-investigating activity dropped to nil, the
press activity skyrocketed to a new peak. A dozen people took off to
dig up their own UFO stories and to draw their own conclusions.
After a quiet January, _True_ again clobbered the reading public.
This time it was a story in the March 1950 issue and it was entitled,
"How Scientists Tracked Flying Saucers." It was written by none other
than the man who was at that time in charge of a team of Navy
scientists at the super hush-hush guided missile test and development
area, White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. He was Commander R. B.
McLaughlin, an Annapolis graduate and a Regular Navy officer. His
story had been cleared by the military and was in absolute, 180-
degree, direct contradiction to every press release that had been
made by the military in the past two years. Not only did the
commander believe that he had proved that UFO's were real but that he
knew what they were. "I am convinced," he wrote in the _True_
article, "that it," referring to a UFO he had seen at White Sands,
"was a flying saucer, and further, that these disks are spaceships
from another planet, operated by animate, intelligent beings."
On several occasions during 1948 and 1949, McLaughlin or his crew at
the White Sands Proving Ground had made good UFO sightings. The best
one was made on April 24, 1949, when the commander's crew of
engineers, scientists, and technicians were getting ready to launch
one of the huge 100-foot-diameter skyhook balloons. It was 10:30A.M.
on an absolutely clear Sunday morning. Prior to the launching, the
crew had sent up a small weather balloon to check the winds at lower
levels. One man was watching the balloon through a theodolite, an
instrument similar to a surveyor's transit built around a 25-power
telescope, one man was holding a stop watch, and a third had a
clipboard to record the measured data. The crew had tracked the
balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly shouted and
pointed off to the left. The whole crew looked at the part of the sky
where the man was excitedly pointing, and there was a UFO. "It didn't
appear to be large," one of the scientists later said, "but it was
plainly visible. It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape
and had a 'whitish-silver color.'" After taking a split second to
realize what they were looking at, one of the men swung the
theodolite around to pick up the object, and the timer reset his stop
watch. For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it moved toward the
east. In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped from an angle of
elevation of 45 degrees to 25 degrees, then it zoomed upward and in a
few seconds it was out of sight. The crew heard no sound and the New
Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard "a
whisper a mile away."
When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew
found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second. At
one time during the observed portion of its flight, the UFO had
passed in front of a range of mountains that were visible to the
observers. Using this as a check point, they estimated the size of
the UFO to be 40 feet wide and 100 feet long, and they computed that
the UFO had been at an altitude of 296,000 feet, or _56_ miles, when
they had first seen it, and that it was traveling 7 miles per second.
This wasn't the only UFO sighting made by White Sands scientists. On
April 5, 1948, another team watched a UFO for several minutes as it
streaked across the afternoon sky in a series of violent maneuvers.
The disk-shaped object was about a fifth the size of a full moon.
On another occasion the crew of a C-47 that was tracking a skyhook
balloon saw two similar UFO's come loping in from just above the
horizon, circle the balloon, which was flying at just under 90,000
feet, and rapidly leave. When the balloon was recovered it was ripped.
I knew the two pilots of the C-47; both of them now believe in
flying saucers. And they aren't alone; so do the people of the
Aeronautical Division of General Mills who launch and track the big
skyhook balloons. These scientists and engineers all have seen UFO's
and they aren't their own balloons. I was almost tossed out of the
General Mills offices into a cold January Minneapolis snowstorm for
suggesting such a thing--but that comes later in our history of the
UFO.
I don't know what these people saw. There has been a lot of interest
generated by these sightings because of the extremely high
qualifications and caliber of the observers. There is some legitimate
doubt as to the accuracy of the speed and altitude figures that
McLaughlin's crew arrived at from the data they measured with their
theodolite. This doesn't mean much, however. Even if they were off by
a factor of 100 per cent, the speeds and altitudes would be
fantastic, and besides they looked at the UFO through a 25-power
telescope and swore that it was a flat, oval-shaped object. Balloons,
birds, and airplanes aren't flat and oval-shaped.
Astrophysicist Dr. Donald Menzel, in a book entitled _Flying_
_Saucers_, says they saw a refracted image of their own balloon
caused by an atmospheric phenomenon. Maybe he is right, but the
General Mills people don't believe it. And their disagreement is
backed up by years of practical experience with the atmosphere, its
tricks and its illusions.
When the March issue of _True_ magazine carrying Commander
McLaughlin's story about how the White Sands Scientists had tracked
UFO's reached the public, it stirred up a hornets' nest. Donald
Keyhoe's article in the January _True_ had converted many people but
there were still a few heathens. The fact that government scientists
had seen UFO's, and were admitting it, took care of a large
percentage of these heathens. More and more people were believing in
flying saucers.
The Navy had no comment to make about the sightings, but they did
comment on McLaughlin. It seems that several months before, at the
suggestion of a group of scientists at White Sands, McLaughlin had
carefully written up the details of the sightings and forwarded them
to Washington. The report contained no personal opinions, just facts.
The comments on McLaughlin's report had been wired back to White
Sands from Washington and they were, "What are you drinking out
there?" A very intelligent answer--and it came from an admiral in the
Navy's guided missile program.
By the time his story was published, McLaughlin was no longer at
White Sands; he was at sea on the destroyer _Bristol_. Maybe he
answered the admiral's wire.
The Air Force had no comment to make on McLaughlin's story. People
at ATIC just shrugged and smiled as they walked by the remains of
Project Grudge, and continued to "process UFO reports through regular
intelligence channels."
In early 1950 the UFO's moved down to Mexico. The newspapers were
full of reports. Tourists were bringing back more saucer stories than
hand-tooled, genuine leather purses. _Time_ reported that pickpockets
were doing a fabulous business working the sky-gazing crowds that
gathered when a _plativolo_ was seen. Mexico's Department of National
Defense reported that there had been some good reports but that the
stories of finding crashed saucers weren't true.
On March 8 one of the best UFO sightings of 1950 took place right
over ATIC.
About midmorning on this date a TWA airliner was coming in to land
at the Dayton Municipal Airport. As the pilot circled to get into the
traffic pattern, he and his copilot saw a bright light hovering off
to the southeast. The pilot called the tower operators at the airport
to tell them about the light, but before he could say anything, the
tower operators told him they were looking at it too. They had called
the operations office of the Ohio Air National Guard, which was
located at the airport, and while the tower operators were talking,
an Air Guard pilot was running toward an F-51, dragging his
parachute, helmet, and oxygen mask.
I knew the pilot, and he later told me, "I wanted to find out once
and for all what these screwy flying saucer reports were all about."
While the F-51 was warming up, the tower operators called ATIC and
told them about the UFO and where to look to see it. The people at
ATIC rushed out and there it was--an extremely bright light, much
brighter and larger than a star. Whatever it was, it was high because
every once in a while it would be blanked out by the thick, high,
scattered clouds that were in the area. While the group of people
were standing in front of ATIC watching the light, somebody ran in
and called the radar lab at Wright Field to see if they had any radar
"on the air." The people in the lab said that they didn't have, but
they could get operational in a hurry. They said they would search
southeast of the field with their radar and suggested that ATIC send
some people over. By the time the ATIC people arrived at the radar
lab the radar was on the air and had a target in the same position as
the light that everyone was looking at. The radar was also picking up
the Air Guard F-51 and an F-51 that had been scrambled from Wright-
Patterson. The pilots of the Air Guard '51 and the Wright-Patterson
'51 could both see the UFO, and they were going after it. The master
sergeant who was operating the radar called the F-51's on the radio,
got them together and started to vector them toward the target. As
the two airplanes climbed they kept up a continual conversation with
the radar operator to make sure they were all after the same thing.
For several minutes they could clearly see the UFO, but when they
reached about 15,000 feet, the clouds moved in and they lost it. The
pilots made a quick decision; since radar showed that they were
getting closer to the target, they decided to spread out to keep from
colliding with one another and to go up through the clouds. They went
on instruments and in a few seconds they were in the cloud. It was
much worse than they'd expected; the cloud was thick, and the
airplanes were icing up fast. An F-51 is far from being a good
instrument ship, but they stayed in their climb until radar called
and said that they were close to the target; in fact, almost on it.
The pilots had another hurried radio conference and decided that
since the weather was so bad they'd better come down. If a UFO, or
something, was in the clouds, they'd hit it before they could see it.
So they made a wise decision; they dropped the noses of their
airplanes and dove back down into the clear. They circled awhile but
the clouds didn't break. In a few minutes the master sergeant on the
radar reported that the target was fading fast. The F-51's went in
and landed.
When the target faded on the radar, some of the people went outside
to visually look for the UFO, but it was obscured by clouds, and the
clouds stayed for an hour. When it finally did clear for a few
minutes, the UFO was gone.
A conference was held at ATIC that afternoon. It included Roy James,
ATIC's electronics specialist and expert on radar UFO's. Roy had been
over at the radar lab and had seen the UFO on the scope but neither
the F-51 pilots nor the master sergeant who operated the radar were
at the conference. The records show that at this meeting a unanimous
decision was reached as to the identity of the UFO's. The bright
light was Venus since Venus was in the southeast during midmorning on
March 8, 1950, and the radar return was caused by the ice-laden cloud
that the F-51 pilots had encountered. Ice-laden clouds can cause a
radar return. The group of intelligence specialists at the meeting
decided that this was further proved by the fact that as the F-51's
approached the center of the cloud their radar return appeared to
approach the UFO target on the radarscope. They were near the UFO and
near ice, so the UFO must have been ice.
The case was closed.
I had read the report of this sighting but I hadn't paid too much
attention to it because it had been "solved." But one day almost two
years later I got a telephone call at my office at Project Blue Book.
It was a master sergeant, the master sergeant who had been operating
the radar at the lab. He'd just heard that the Air Force was again
seriously investigating UFO's and he wanted to see what had been said
about the Dayton Incident. He came over, read the report, and
violently disagreed with what had been decided upon as the answer. He
said that he'd been working with radar before World War II; he'd
helped with the operational tests on the first microwave warning
radars developed early in the war by a group headed by Dr. Luis
Alvarez. He said that what he saw on that radarscope was no ice
cloud; it was some type of aircraft. He'd seen every conceivable type
of weather target on radar, he told me; thunderstorms, ice-laden
clouds, targets caused by temperature inversions, and the works. They
all had similar characteristics--the target was "fuzzy" and varied in
intensity. But in this case the target was a good, solid return and
he was convinced that it was caused by a good, solid object. And
besides, he said, when the target began to fade on his scope he had
raised the tilt of the antenna and the target came back, indicating
that whatever it was, it was climbing. Ice-laden clouds don't climb,
he commented rather bitterly.
Nor did the pilot of one of the F-51's agree with the ATIC analysis.
The pilot who had been leading the two-ship flight of F-51's on that
day told me that what he saw was no planet. While he and his wing man
were climbing, and before the clouds obscured it, they both got a
good look at the UFO, and it was getting bigger and more distinct all
the time. As they climbed, the light began to take on a shape; it was
definitely round. And if it had been Venus it should have been in the
same part of the sky the next day, but the pilot said that he'd
looked and it wasn't there. The ATIC report doesn't mention this point.
I remember asking him a second time what the UFO looked like; he
said, "huge and metallic"--shades of the Mantell Incident.
The Dayton Incident didn't get much of a play from the press because
officially it wasn't an unknown and there's nothing intriguing about
an ice cloud and Venus. There were UFO reports in the newspapers,
however.
One story that was widely printed was about a sighting at the naval
air station at Dallas, Texas. Just before noon on March 16, Chief
Petty Officer Charles Lewis saw a disk-shaped UFO come streaking
across the sky and buzz a high-flying B-36. Lewis first saw the UFO
coming in from the north, lower than the B-36; then he saw it pull up
to the big bomber as it got closer. It hovered under the B-36 for an
instant, then it went speeding off and disappeared. When the press
inquired about the incident, Captain M. A. Nation, commander of the
air station, vouched for his chief and added that the base tower
operators had seen and reported a UFO to him about ten days before.
This story didn't run long because the next day a bigger one broke
when the sky over the little town of Farmington, New Mexico, about
170 miles northwest of Albuquerque, was literally invaded by UFO's.
Every major newspaper carried the story. The UFO's had apparently
been congregating over the four corners area for two days because
several people had reported seeing UFO's on March 15 and 16. But the
seventeenth was the big day, every saucer this side of Polaris must
have made a successful rendezvous over Farmington, because on that
day most of the town's 3,600 citizens saw the mass fly-by. The first
reports were made at 10:15A.M.; then for an hour the air was full of
flying saucers. Estimates of the number varied from a conservative
500 to "thousands." Most all the observers said the UFO's were saucer-
shaped, traveled at almost unbelievable speeds, and didn't seem to
have any set flight path. They would dart in and out and seemed to
avoid collisions only by inches. There was no doubt that they weren't
hallucinations because the mayor, the local newspaper staff, ex-
pilots, the highway patrol, and every type of person who makes up a
community of 3,600 saw them.
I've talked to several people who were in Farmington and saw this
now famous UFO display of St. Patrick's Day, 1950. I've heard dozens
of explanations--cotton blowing in the wind, bugs' wings reflecting
sunlight, a hoax to put Farmington on the map, and real honest-to-
goodness flying saucers. One explanation was never publicized,
however, and if there is an explanation, it is the best. Under
certain conditions of extreme cold, probably 50 to 60 degrees below
zero, the plastic bag of a skyhook balloon will get very brittle, and
will take on the characteristics of a huge light bulb. If a sudden
gust of wind or some other disturbance hits the balloon, it will
shatter into a thousand pieces. As these pieces of plastic float down
and are carried along by the wind, they could look like thousands of
flying saucers.
On St. Patrick's Day a skyhook balloon launched from Holloman AFB,
adjacent to the White Sands Proving Ground, did burst near
Farmington, and it was cold enough at 60,000 feet to make the balloon
brittle. True, the people at Farmington never found any pieces of
plastic, but the small pieces of plastic are literally as light as
feathers and could have floated far beyond the city.
The next day, on March 18, the Air Force, prodded by the press,
shrugged and said, "There's nothing to it," but they had no
explanation.
_True_ magazine came through for a third time when their April
issue, which was published during the latter part of March 1950,
carried a roundup of UFO photos. They offered seven photos as proof
that UFO's existed. It didn't take a photo-interpretation expert to
tell that all seven could well be of doubtful lineage, nevertheless
the collection of photos added fuel to the already smoldering fire.
The U.S. public was hearing a lot about flying saucers and all of it
was on the pro side. For somebody who didn't believe in the things,
the public thought that the Air Force was being mighty quiet.
The subject took on added interest on the night of March 26, when a
famous news commentator said the UFO's were from Russia.
The next night Henry J. Taylor, in a broadcast from Dallas, Texas,
said that the UFO's were Uncle Sam's own. He couldn't tell all he
knew, but a flying saucer had been found on the beach near Galveston,
Texas. It had USAF markings.
Two nights later a Los Angeles television station cut into a regular
program with a special news flash; later in the evening the announcer
said they would show the first photos of the real thing, our
military's flying saucer. The photos turned out to be of the Navy XF-
5-U, a World War II experimental aircraft that never flew.
The public was now thoroughly confused.
By now the words "flying saucer" were being batted around by every
newspaper reporter, radio and TV newscaster, comedian, and man on the
street. Some of the comments weren't complimentary, but as Theorem I
of the publicity racket goes, "It doesn't make any difference what's
said as long as the name's spelled right."
Early in April the publication that is highly revered by so many,
_U.S._ _News_ _and_ _World_ _Report_, threw in their lot. The UFO's
belonged to the Navy. Up popped the old non-flying XF-5-U again.
Events drifted back to normal when Edward R. Murrow made UFO's the
subject of one of his TV documentaries. He took his viewers around
the U.S., talked to Kenneth Arnold, of original UFO fame, by phone
and got the story of Captain Mantell's death from a reporter "who was
there." Sandwiched in between accounts of actual UFO sightings were
the pro and con opinions of top Washington brass, scientists, and the
man on the street.
Even the staid New York _Times_, which had until now stayed out of
UFO controversy, broke down and ran an editorial entitled, "Those
Flying Saucers--Are They or Aren't They?"
All of this activity did little to shock the military out of their
dogma. They admitted that the UFO investigation really hadn't been
discontinued. "Any substantial reports of any unusual aerial
phenomena would be processed through normal intelligence channels,"
they told the press.
Ever since July 4, 1947, ten days after the first flying saucer
report, airline pilots had been reporting that they had seen UFO's.
But the reports weren't frequent--maybe one every few months. In the
spring of 1950 this changed, however, and the airline pilots began to
make more and more reports--good reports. The reports went to ATIC
but they didn't receive much attention. In a few instances there was
a semblance of an investigation but it was halfhearted. The reports
reached the newspapers too, and here they received a great deal more
attention. The reports were investigated, and the stories checked and
rechecked. When airline crews began to turn in one UFO report after
another, it was difficult to believe the old "hoax, hallucination,
and misidentification of known objects" routine. In April, May, and
June of 1950 there were over thirty-five good reports from airline
crews.
One of these was a report from a Chicago and Southern crew who were
flying a DC-3 from Memphis to Little Rock, Arkansas, on the night of
March 31. It was an exceptionally clear night, no clouds or haze, a
wonderful night to fly. At exactly nine twenty-nine by the cockpit
clock the pilot, a Jack Adams, noticed a white light off to his left.
The copilot, G. W. Anderson, was looking at the chart but out of the
corner of his eye he saw the pilot lean forward and look out the
window, so he looked out too. He saw the light just as the pilot
said, "What's that?"