In a few days I was notified that my plan had been given the green
light. I already had the plan written up in the form of a staff study
so I sent it through channels for formal approval.
It had been obvious right from the start of the reorganization of
Project Grudge that there would be questions that no one on my staff
was technically competent to answer. To have a fully staffed project,
I'd need an astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, a mathematician, a
psychologist, and probably a dozen other specialists. It was, of
course, impossible to have all of these people on my staff, so I
decided to do the next best thing. I would set up a contract with
some research organization who already had such people on their
staff; then I would call on them whenever their services were needed.
I soon found a place that was interested in such a contract, and the
day after Christmas, Colonel S. H. Kirkland, of Colonel Dunn's staff,
and I left Dayton for a two-day conference with these people to
outline what we wanted. Their organization cannot be identified by
name because they are doing other highly secret work for the
government. I'll call them Project Bear.
Project Bear is a large, well-known research organization in the
Midwest. The several hundred engineers and scientists who make up
their staff run from experts on soils to nuclear physicists. They
would make these people available to me to assist Project Grudge on
any problem that might arise from a UFO report. They did not have a
staff astronomer or psychologist, but they agreed to get them for us
on a subcontract basis. Besides providing experts in every field of
science, they would make two studies for us; a study of how much a
person can be expected to see and remember from a UFO sighting, and a
statistical study of UFO reports. The end product of the study of the
powers of observation of a UFO observer would be an interrogation form.
Ever since the Air Force had been in the UFO business, attempts had
been made to construct a form that a person who had seen a UFO could
fill out. Many types had been tried but all of them had major
disadvantages. Project Bear, working with the psychology department
of a university, would study all of the previous questionnaires,
along with actual UFO reports, and try to come up with as near a
perfect interrogation form as possible. The idea was to make the form
simple and yet extract as much and as accurate data as possible from
the observer.
The second study that Project Bear would undertake would be a
statistical study of all UFO reports. Since 1947 the Air Force had
collected about 650 reports, but if our plan to encourage UFO reports
worked out the way we expected this number could increase tenfold. To
handle this volume of reports, Project Bear said that they would set
up a complete UFO file on IBM punch cards. Then if we wanted any bit
of information from the files, it would be a matter of punching a few
buttons on an IBM card-sorting machine, and the files would be sorted
electronically in a few seconds. Approximately a hundred items
pertaining to a UFO report would be put on each card. These items
included everything from the time the UFO was seen to its position in
the sky and the observer's personality. The items punched on the
cards would correspond to the items on the questionnaires that
Project Bear was going to develop.
Besides giving us a rapid method of sorting data, this IBM file
would give us a modus operandi file. Our MO file would be similar to
the MO files used by police departments to file the methods of
operations of a criminal. Thus when we received a report we could put
the characteristics of the reported UFO on an IBM punch card, put it
into the IBM machine, and compare it with the characteristics of
other sightings that had known solutions. The answer might be that
out of the one hundred items on the card, ninety-five were identical
to previous UFO reports that ducks were flying over a city at night
reflecting the city's lights.
On the way home from the meeting Colonel Kirkland and I were both
well satisfied with the assistance we believed Project Bear could
give to Project Grudge.
In a few days I again left ATIC, this time for Air Defense Command
Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I wanted to find out how
willing ADC was to help us and what they could do. When I arrived I
got a thorough briefing on the operations of ADC and the promise that
they would do anything they could to help solve the UFO riddle.
All of this co-operation was something that I hadn't expected. I'd
been warned by the people who had worked on Project Sign and the old
Project Grudge that everybody hated the word UFO--I'd have to fight
for everything I asked for. But once again they were wrong. The
scientists who visited ATIC, General Samford, Project Bear, and now
Air Defense Command couldn't have been more co-operative. I was
becoming aware that there was much wider concern about UFO reports
than I'd ever realized before.
While I traveled around the United States getting the project set
up, UFO reports continued to come in and all of them were good. One
series of reports was especially good, and they came from a group of
people who had had a great deal of experience watching things in the
sky--the people who launch the big skyhook balloons for General
Mills, Inc. The reports of what the General Mills people had seen
while they were tracking their balloons covered a period of over a
year. They had just sent them in because they had heard that Project
Grudge was being reorganized and was taking a different view on UFO
reports. They, like so many other reliable observers, had been
disgusted with the previous Air Force attitude toward UFO reports,
and they had refused to send in any reports. I decided that these
people might be a good source of information, and I wanted to get
further details on their reports, so I got orders to go to
Minneapolis. A scientist from Project Bear went with me. We arrived
on January 14, 1952, in the middle of a cold wave and a blizzard.
The Aeronautical Division of General Mills, Inc., of Wheaties and
Betty Crocker fame, had launched and tracked every skyhook balloon
that had been launched prior to mid-1952. They knew what their
balloons looked like under all lighting conditions and they also knew
meteorology, aerodynamics, astronomy, and they knew UFO's. I talked
to these people for the better part of a full day, and every time I
tried to infer that there might be some natural explanation for the
UFO's I just about found myself in a fresh snowdrift.
What made these people so sure that UFO's existed? In the first
place, they had seen many of them. One man told me that one tracking
crew had seen so many that the sight of a UFO no longer even
especially interested them. And the things that they saw couldn't be
explained.
For example: On January 16, 1951, two people from General Mills and
four people from Artesia, New Mexico, were watching a skyhook balloon
from the Artesia airport. They had been watching the balloon off and
on for about an hour when one of the group saw two tiny specks on the
horizon, off to the northwest. He pointed them out to the others
because two airplanes were expected into the airport, and he thought
that these might be the airplanes. But as they watched, the two
specks began to move in fast, and within a few seconds the observers
could see that "the airplanes" were actually two round, dull white
objects flying in close formation. The two objects continued to come
in and headed straight toward the balloon. When they reached the
balloon they circled it once and flew off to the northwest, where
they disappeared over the horizon. As the two UFO's circled the
balloon, they tipped on edge and the observers saw that they were
disk-shaped.
When the two UFO's were near the balloon, the observers also had a
chance to compare the size of the UFO's with the size of the balloon.
If the UFO's were as close to the balloon as they appeared to be they
would have been 60 feet in diameter.
After my visit to General Mills, Inc., I couldn't help remembering a
magazine article I'd read about a year before. It said that there was
not a single reliable UFO report that couldn't be attributed to a
skyhook balloon.
I'd been back at ATIC only a few days when I found myself packing up
to leave again. This time it was for New York. A high-priority wire
had come into ATIC describing how a Navy pilot had chased a UFO over
Mitchel AFB, on Long Island. It was a good report.
I remember the trip to New York because my train passed through
Elizabeth, New Jersey, early in the morning, and I could see the
fires caused by an American Airlines Convair that had crashed. This
was the second of the three tragic Elizabeth, New Jersey, crashes.
The morning before, on January 21, a Navy pilot had taken off from
Mitchel in a TBM. He was a lieutenant commander, had flown in World
War II, and was now an engineer at the Navy Special Devices Center on
Long Island. At nine-fifty he had cleared the traffic pattern and was
at about 2,500 feet, circling around the airfield. He was southeast
of the field when he first noticed an object below him and "about
three runway lengths off the end of Runway 30." The object looked
like the top of a parachute canopy, he told me; it was white and he
thought he could see the wedges or panels. He said that he thought
that it was moving across the ground a little bit too fast to be
drifting with wind, but he was sure that somebody had bailed out and
that he was looking at the top of his parachute. He was just ready to
call the tower when he suddenly realized that this "parachute" was
drifting across the wind. He had just taken off from Runway 30 and
knew which direction the wind was blowing.
As he watched, the object, whatever it was (by now he no longer
thought that it was a parachute), began to gradually climb, so he
started to climb, he said, staying above and off to the right of the
object. When the UFO started to make a left turn, he followed and
tried to cut inside, but he overshot and passed over it. It continued
to turn and gain speed, so he dropped the nose of the TBM, put on
more power, and pulled in behind the object, which was now level with
him. In a matter of seconds the UFO made a 180-degree turn and
started to make a big swing around the northern edge of Mitchel AFB.
The pilot tried to follow, but the UFO had begun to accelerate
rapidly, and since a TBM leaves much to be desired on the speed end,
he was getting farther and farther behind. But he did try to follow
it as long as he could. As he made a wide turn around the northern
edge of the airfield he saw that the UFO was now turning south. He
racked the TBM up into a tight left turn to follow, but in a few
seconds the UFO had disappeared. When he last saw it, it had crossed
the Long Island coast line near Freeport and it was heading out to sea.
When he finished his account of the chase, I asked the commander
some specific questions about the UFO. He said that just after he'd
decided that the UFO was not a parachute it appeared to be at an
altitude of about 200 to 300 feet over a residential section. From
the time it took it to cover a city block, he'd estimated that it was
traveling about 300 miles an hour. Even when he pulled in behind the
object and got a good look, it still looked like a parachute canopy--
dome-shaped--white--and it had a dark undersurface. It had been in
sight two and a half minutes.
He had called the control tower at Mitchel during the chase, he told
me, but only to ask if any balloons had been launched. He thought
that he might be seeing a balloon. The tower had told him that there
was a balloon in the area.
Then the commander took out an aeronautical chart and drew in his
flight path and the apparent path of the UFO for me. I think that he
drew it accurately because he had been continually watching landmarks
as he'd chased the UFO and was very careful as he drew the sketches
on the map.
I checked with the weather detachment at Mitchel and they said that
they had released a balloon. They had released it at nine-fifty and
from a point southeast of the airfield. I got a plot of its path.
Just as in the Long Beach Incident, where the six F-86's tried to
intercept the UFO, the balloon was almost exactly in line with the
spot where the UFO was first seen, but then any proof you might
attempt falls apart. If the pilot knew where he was, and had plotted
his flight path even semi-accurately, he was never over the balloon.
Yet he was over the UFO. He came within less than 2,000 feet of the
UFO when he passed over it; yet he couldn't recognize it as a balloon
even though he thought it might be a balloon since the tower had just
told him that there was one in the area. He said that he followed the
UFO around the north edge of the airfield. Yet the balloon, after it
was launched southeast of the field, continued on a southeast course
and never passed north of the airfield.
But the biggest argument against the object's being a balloon was
the fact that the pilot pulled in behind it; it was directly off the
nose of his airplane, and although he followed it for more than a
minute, it pulled away from him. Once you line up an airplane on a
balloon and go straight toward it you will catch it in a matter of
seconds, even in the slowest airplane. There have been dogfights with
UFO's where the UFO's turned out to be balloons, but the pilots
always reported that the UFO "made a pass" at them. In other words,
they rapidly caught up with the balloon and passed it. I questioned
this pilot over and over on this one point, and he was positive that
he had followed directly behind the UFO for over a minute and all the
time it was pulling away from him.
This is one of the most typical UFO reports we had in our files. It
is typical because no matter how you argue there isn't any definite
answer. If you want to argue that the pilot didn't know where he was
during the chase--that he was 3 or 4 miles from where he thought he
was--that he never did fly around the northern edge of the field and
get in behind the UFO--then the UFO could have been a balloon.
But if you want to believe that the pilot knew where he was all
during the chase, and he did have several thousand hours of flying
time, then all you can conclude is that the UFO was an unknown.
I think the pilot summed up the situation very aptly when he told me, "I
don't know what it was, but I've never seen anything like it before or
since--maybe it was a spaceship."