While I was in Lubbock, Lieutenant Henry Metscher, who was helping
me on Project Grudge, had been sorting out the many bits and pieces
of information that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel
Rosengarten had brought back from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and he
had the answers.
The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling
at a terrific speed because he couldn't lock on to it turned out to
be a 400-mile-an-hour conventional airplane. He'd just gotten fouled
up on his procedures for putting the radar set on automatic tracking.
The sighting by the two officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when
Metscher showed how they'd seen a balloon.
The second radar sighting of the series also turned out to be a
balloon. The frantic phone call from headquarters requesting a
reading on the object's altitude was to settle a bet. Some officers
in headquarters had seen the balloon launched and were betting on how
high it was.
The second day's radar sightings were caused by another balloon and
weather--both enhanced by the firm conviction that there were some
mighty queer goings on over Jersey.
The success with the Fort Monmouth Incident had gone to our heads
and we were convinced that with a little diligent digging we'd be
knocking off saucers like an ace skeet-shooter. With all the
confidence in the world, I attacked the Long Beach Incident, which
I'd had to drop to go to Lubbock, Texas. But if saucers could laugh,
they were probably zipping through the stratosphere chuckling to
themselves, because there was no neat solution to this one.
In the original report of how the six F-86's chased the high-flying
UFO over Long Beach, the intelligence officer who made the report had
said that he'd checked all aircraft flights, therefore this wasn't
the answer.
The UFO could have been a balloon, so I sent a wire to the Air Force
weather detachment at the Long Beach Municipal Airport. I wanted the
track of any balloon that was in the air at 7:55A.M. on September 23,
1951. While I was waiting for the answers to my two wires, Lieutenant
Metscher and I began to sort out old UFO reports. It was a big job
because back in 1949, when the old Project Grudge had been disbanded,
the files had just been dumped into storage bins. Hank and I now had
four filing case drawers full of a heterogeneous mass of UFO reports,
letters, copies of letters, and memos.
But I didn't get to do much sorting because the mail girl brought in
a copy of a wire that had just arrived. It was a report of a UFO
sighting at Terre Haute, Indiana. I read it and told Metscher that
I'd quickly whip out an answer and get back to helping him sort. But
it didn't prove to be that easy.
The report from Terre Haute said that on October 9, a CAA employee
at Hulman Municipal Airport had observed a silvery UFO. Three minutes
later a pilot, flying east of Terre Haute, had seen a similar object.
The report lacked many details but a few phone calls filled me in on
the complete story.
At 1:43P.M. on the ninth a CAA employee at the airport was walking
across the ramp in front of the administration building. He happened
to glance up at the sky--why, he didn't know--and out of the corner
of his eye he caught a flash of light on the southeastern horizon. He
stopped and looked at the sky where the flash of light had been but
he couldn't see anything. He was just about to walk on when he
noticed what he described as "a pinpoint" of light in the same spot
where he'd seen the flash. In a second or two the "pinpoint" grew
larger and it was obvious to the CAA man that something was
approaching the airport at a terrific speed. As he watched, the
object grew larger and larger until it flashed directly overhead and
disappeared to the northwest. The CAA man said it all happened so
fast and he was so amazed that he hadn't called anybody to come out
of the nearby hangar and watch the UFO. But when he'd calmed down he
remembered a few facts. The UFO had been in sight for about fifteen
seconds and during this time it had passed from horizon to horizon.
It was shaped like a "flattened tennis ball," was a bright silver
color, and when it was directly overhead it was "the size of a 50-
cent piece held at arm's length."
But this wasn't all there was to the report. A matter of minutes
after the sighting a pilot radioed Terre Haute that he had seen a
UFO. He was flying from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois,
when just east of Paris he'd looked back and to his left. There,
level with his airplane and fairly close, was a large silvery object,
"like a flattened orange," hanging motionless in the sky. He looked
at it a few seconds, then hauled his plane around in a tight left
bank. He headed directly toward the UFO, but it suddenly began to
pick up speed and shot off toward the northeast. The time, by the
clock on his instrument panel, was 1:45P.M.--just two minutes after
the sighting at Terre Haute.
When I finished calling I got an aeronautical chart out of the file
and plotted the points of the sighting. The CAA employee had seen the
UFO disappear over the northwestern horizon. The pilot had been
flying from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, so he'd have
been flying on a heading of just a little less than 270 degrees, or
almost straight west. He was just east of Paris when he'd first seen
the UFO, and since he said that he'd looked back and to his left, the
spot where he saw the UFO would be right at a spot where the CAA man
had seen his UFO disappear. Both observers had checked their watches
with radio time just after the sightings, so there couldn't be more
than a few seconds' discrepancy. All I could conclude was that both
had seen the same UFO.
I checked the path of every balloon in the Midwest. I checked the
weather--it was a clear, cloudless day; I had the two observers'
backgrounds checked and I even checked for air traffic, although I
knew the UFO wasn't an airplane. I researched the University of
Dayton library for everything on daylight meteors, but this was no
good. From the description the CAA employee gave, what he'd seen had
been a clear-cut, distinct, flattened sphere, with no smoke trail, no
sparks and no tail. A daylight meteor, so low as to be described as
"a 50-cent piece held at arm's length," would have had a smoke trail,
sparks, and would have made a roar that would have jolted the Sphinx.
This one was quiet. Besides, no daylight meteor stops long enough to
let an airplane turn into it.
Conclusion: Unknown.
In a few days the data from the Long Beach Incident came in and I
started to put it together. A weather balloon had been launched from
the Long Beach Airport, and it was in the vicinity where the six F-
86's had made their unsuccessful attempt to intercept a UFO. I
plotted out the path of the balloon, the reported path of the UFO,
and the flight paths of the F-86's. The paths of the balloon and the
F-86's were accurate, I knew, because the balloon was being tracked
by radio fixes and the F-86's had been tracked by radar. At only one
point did the paths of the balloon, UFO, and F-86's coincide. When
the first two F-86's made their initial visual contact with the UFO
they were looking almost directly at the balloon. But from then on,
even by altering the courses of the F-86's, I couldn't prove a thing.
In addition, the weather observers from Long Beach said that during
the period that the intercept was taking place they had gone outside
and looked at their balloon; it was an exceptionally clear day and
they could see it at unusually high altitudes. They didn't see any F-
86's around it. And one stronger point, the balloon had burst about
ten minutes before the F-86's lost sight of the UFO.
Lieutenant Metscher took over and, riding on his Fort Monmouth
victory, tried to show how the pilots had seen the balloon. He got
the same thing I did--nothing.
On October 27, 1951, the new Project Grudge was officially
established. I'd written the necessary letters and had received the
necessary endorsements. I'd estimated, itemized, and justified direct
costs and manpower. I'd conferred, inferred, and referred, and now I
had the money to operate. The next step was to pile up all this paper
work as an aerial barrier, let the saucers crash into it, and fall
just outside the door.
I was given a very flexible operating policy for Project Grudge
because no one knew the best way to track down UFO's. I had only one
restriction and that was that I wouldn't have my people spending time
doing a lot of wild speculating. Our job would be to analyze each and
every UFO report and try to find what we believed to be an honest,
unbiased answer. If we could not identify the reported object as
being a balloon, meteor, planet, or one of half a hundred other
common things that are sometimes called UFO's, we would mark the
folder "Unknown" and file it in a special file. At some later date,
when we built up enough of these "Unknown" reports, we'd study them.
As long as I was chief of the UFO project, this was our basic rule.
If anyone became anti-flying saucer and was no longer capable of
making an unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went. Conversely
anyone who became a believer was through. We were too busy during the
initial phases of the project to speculate as to whether the unknowns
were spaceships, space monsters, Soviet weapons, or ethereal visions.