What Are UFO's?
While the scientists were in Washington, D.C., pondering over the
UFO, the UFO's weren't just sitting idly by waiting to find out what
they were--they were out doing a little "lobbying" for the cause--
keeping the interest stirred up.
And they were doing a good job, too.
It was just a few minutes before midnight on January 28, 1953, when
a message flashed into Wright-Patterson for Project Blue Book. It was
sent "Operational Immediate," so it had priority handling; I was
reading it by 12:30A.M. A pilot had chased a UFO.
The report didn't have many details but it did sound good. It gave
the pilot's name and said that he could be reached at Moody AFB. I
put in a long-distance call, found the pilot, and flipped on my
recorder so that I could get his story word for word.
He told me that he had been flying an F-86 on a "round-robin"
navigation flight from Moody AFB to Lawson AFB to Robins AFB, then
back to Moody--all in Georgia. At exactly nine thirty-five he was at
6,000 feet, heading toward Lawson AFB on the first leg of his flight.
He remembered that he had just looked down and had seen the lights of
Albany, Georgia; then he'd looked up again and seen this bright white
light at "ten o'clock high." It was an unusually bright light, and he
said that he thought this was why it was so noticeable among the
stars. He flew on for a few minutes watching it as he passed over
Albany. He decided that it must be an extremely bright star or
another airplane--except it just didn't look right. It had too much
of a definitely circular shape.
It was a nice night to fly and he had to get in so much time anyway,
so he thought he'd try to get a little closer to it. If it was an
airplane, chances were he could close in and if it was a star, he
should be able to climb up to 30,000 feet and the light shouldn't
change its relative position. He checked his oxygen supply, increased
the r.p.m. of the engine, and started to climb. In three or four
minutes it was obvious that he was getting above the light, and he
watched it; it had moved in relation to the stars. It must be an
airplane then, he'd decided--an airplane so far away that he couldn't
see its red and green wing tip lights.
Since he'd gone this far, he decided that he'd get closer and make
sure it _was_ an airplane; so he dropped the nose of the F-86 and
started down. As the needle on the machmeter nudged the red line, he
saw that he was getting closer because the light was getting bigger,
but still he couldn't see any lights other than the one big white
one. Then it wasn't white any longer; it was changing color. In about
a two-second cycle it changed from white to red, then back to white
again. It went through this cycle two or three times, and then before
he could realize what was going on, he told me, the light changed in
shape to a perfect triangle. Then it split into two triangles, one
above the other. By this time he had leveled off and wasn't closing
in any more. In a flash the whole thing was gone. He used the old
standard description for a disappearing UFO: "It was just like
someone turning off a light--it's there, then it's gone."
I asked him what he thought he'd seen. He'd thought about flying
saucers, he said, but he "just couldn't swallow those stories." He
thought he had a case of vertigo and the more he thought about it,
the surer he was that this was the answer. He'd felt pretty foolish,
he told me, and he was glad that he was alone.
Up ahead he saw the sprawling lights of Fort Benning and Lawson AFB,
his turning point on the flight, and he'd started to turn but then
he'd checked his fuel. The climb had used up quite a bit, so he
changed his mind about going to Robins AFB and started straight back
to Moody.
He called in to the ground station to change his flight plan, but
before he could say anything the ground radio operator asked him if
he'd seen a mysterious light.
Well--he'd seen a light.
Then the ground operator proceeded to tell him that the UFO chase
had been watched on radar. First the radar had the UFO target on the
scope, and it was a UFO because it was traveling much too slowly to
be an airplane. Then the radar operators saw the F-86 approach,
climb, and make a shallow dive toward the UFO. At first the F-86 had
closed in on the UFO, but then the UFO had speeded up just enough to
maintain a comfortable lead. This went on for two or three minutes;
then it had moved off the scope at a terrific speed. The radar site
had tried to call him, the ground station told the F-86 pilot, but
they couldn't raise him so the message had to be relayed through the
tower.
Rack up two more points for the UFO--another unknown and another
confirmed believer.
Two or three weeks after the meeting of the panel of scientists in
Washington I received word that Project Blue Book would follow the
recommendations that the panel had made. I was to start implementing
the plan right away. Our proposal for setting up instruments had gone
to the Pentagon weeks before, so that was already taken care of. We
needed more people, so I drew up a new organizational cable that
called for more investigators and analysts and sent it through to
ATIC's personnel section.
About this time in the history of the UFO the first of a series of
snags came up. The scientists had strongly recommended that we hold
nothing back--give the public everything. Accordingly, when the press
got wind of the Tremonton Movie, which up until this time had been a
closely guarded secret, I agreed to release it for the newsmen to
see. I wrote a press release which was O.K.'d by General Garland,
then the chief of ATIC, and sent it to the Pentagon. It told what the
panel had said about the movies, "until proved otherwise there is no
reason why the UFO's couldn't have been sea gulls." Then the release
went on to say that we weren't sure exactly what the UFO's were, the
sea gull theory was only an opinion. When the Pentagon got the draft
of the release they screamed, "No!" No movie for the press and no
press release. The sea gull theory was too weak, and we had a new
publicity policy as of now--don't say anything.
This policy, incidentally, is still in effect. The January 7, 1955,
issue of the _Air_ _Force_ _Information_ _Services_ _Letter_ said, in
essence, people in the Air Force are talking too much about UFO's--
shut up. The old theory that if you ignore them they'll go away is
again being followed.
Inside of a month the UFO project took a few more hard jolts. In
December of 1952 I'd asked for a transfer. I'd agreed to stay on as
chief of Blue Book until the end of February so that a replacement
could be obtained and be broken in. But no replacement showed up. And
none showed up when Lieutenant Rothstien's tour of active duty ended,
when Lieutenant Andy Flues transferred to the Alaskan Air Command, or
when others left. When I left the UFO project for a two-month tour of
temporary duty in Denver, Lieutenant Bob Olsson took over as chief.
His staff consisted of Airman First Class Max Futch. Both men were
old veterans of the UFO campaign of '52, but two people can do only
so much.
When I came back to ATIC in July 1953 and took over another job,
Lieutenant Olsson was just getting out of the Air Force and Al/c
Futch was now it. He said that he felt like the President of
Antarctica on a non-expedition year. In a few days I again had
Project Blue Book, as an additional duty this time, and I had orders
to "build it up."
While I had been gone, our instrumentation plan had been rejected.
Higher headquarters had decided against establishing a net of manned
tracking stations, astronomical cameras tied in with radars, and our
other proposed instrumentation. General Garland had argued long and
hard for the plan, but he'd lost. It was decided that the cameras
with diffraction gratings over the lenses, the cameras that had been
under development for a year, would suffice.
The camera program had started out as a top-priority project, but it
had lost momentum fast when we'd tested these widely publicized
instruments and found that they wouldn't satisfactorily photograph a
million-candle power flare at 450 yards. The cameras themselves were
all right, but in combination with the gratings, they were no good.
However, Lieutenant Olsson had been told to send them out, so he sent
them out.
The first thing that I did when I returned to Project Blue Book was
to go over the reports that had come in while I was away. There were
several good reports but only one that was exceptional. It had taken
place at Luke AFB, Arizona, the Air Force's advanced fighter-bomber
school that is named after the famous "balloon buster" of World War
I, Lieutenant Frank Luke, Jr. It was a sighting that produced some
very interesting photographs.
There were only a few high cirrus clouds in the sky late on the
morning of March 3 when a pilot took off from Luke in an F-84 jet to
log some time. He had been flying F-51's in Korea and had recently
started to check out in the jets. He took off, cleared the traffic
pattern, and started climbing toward Blythe Radio, about 130 miles
west of Luke. He'd climbed for several minutes and had just picked up
the coded letters BLH that identified Blythe Radio when he looked up
through the corner glass in the front part of his canopy--high at
about two o'clock he saw what he thought was an airplane angling
across his course from left to right leaving a long, thin vapor
trail. He glanced down at his altimeter and saw that he was at 23,000
feet. The object that was leaving the vapor trail must really be
high, he remembered thinking, because he couldn't see any airplane at
the head of it. He altered his course a few degrees to the right so
that he could follow the trail and increased his rate of climb.
Before long he could tell that he was gaining on the object, or
whatever was leaving the vapor trail, because he was under the
central part of it. But he still couldn't see any object. This was
odd, he thought, because vapor trails don't just happen; something
has to leave them. His altimeter had ticked off another 12,000 feet
and he was now at 35,000. He kept on climbing, but soon the '84 began
to mush; it was as high as it would go. The pilot dropped down 1,000
feet and continued on--now he was below the front of the trail, but
still no airplane. This bothered him too. Nothing that we have flies
over 55,000 feet except a few experimental airplanes like the D-558
or those of the "X" series, and they don't stray far from Edwards AFB
in California. He couldn't be more than 15,000 feet from the front of
the trail, and you can recognize any kind of an airplane 15,000 feet
away in the clear air of the substratosphere. He looked and he looked
and he looked. He rocked the F-84 back and forth thinking maybe he
had a flaw in the plexiglass of the canopy that was blinking out the
airplane, but still no airplane. Whatever it was, it was darn high or
darn small. It was moving about 300 miles an hour because he had to
pull off power and "S" to stay under it.
He was beginning to get low on fuel about this time so he hauled up
the nose of the jet, took about 30 feet of gun camera film, and
started down. When he landed and told his story, the film was quickly
processed and rushed to the projection room. It showed a weird, thin,
forked vapor trail--but no airplane.
Lieutenant Olsson and Airman Futch had worked this one over
thoroughly. The photo lab confirmed that the trail was definitely a
vapor trail, not a freak cloud formation. But Air Force Flight
Service said, "No other airplanes in the area," and so did Air
Defense Command, because minutes after the F-84 pilot broke off
contact, the "object" had passed into an ADIZ--Air Defense
Identification Zone--and radar had shown nothing.
There was one last possibility: Blue Book's astronomer said that the
photos looked exactly like a meteor's smoke trail. But there was one
hitch: the pilot was positive that the head of the vapor trail was
moving at about 300 miles an hour. He didn't know exactly how much
ground he'd covered, but when he first picked up Blythe Radio he was
on Green 5 airway, about 30 miles west of his base, and when he'd
given up the chase he'd gotten another radio bearing, and he was now
almost up to Needles Radio, 70 miles north of Blythe. He could see a
lake, Lake Mojave, in the distance.
Could a high-altitude jet-stream wind have been blowing the smoke
cloud? Futch had checked this--no. The winds above 20,000 feet were
the usual westerlies and the jet stream was far to the north.
Several months later I talked to a captain who had been at Luke when
this sighting occurred. He knew the F-84 pilot and he'd heard him
tell his story in great detail. I won't say that he was a confirmed
believer, but he was interested. "I never thought much about these
reports before," he said, "but I know this guy well. He's not nuts.
What do you think he saw?"
I don't know what he saw. Maybe he didn't travel as far as he
thought he did. If he didn't, then I'd guess that he saw a meteor's
smoke trail. But if he did know that he'd covered some 80 miles
during the chase, I'd say that he saw a UFO--a real one. And I find
it hard to believe that pilots don't know what they're doing.
During the summer of 1953, UFO reports dropped off considerably.
During May, June, and July of 1952 we'd received 637 good reports.
During the same months in 1953 we received only seventy-six. We had
been waiting for the magic month of July to roll around again because
every July there had been the sudden and unexplained peak in
reporting; we wanted to know if it would happen again. It didn't--
only twenty-one reports came in, to make July the lowest month of the
year. But July did bring new developments.
Project Blue Book got a badly needed shot in the arm when an
unpublicized but highly important change took place: another
intelligence agency began to take over all field investigations.
Ever since I'd returned to the project, the orders had been to build
it up--get more people--do what the panel recommended. But when I'd
asked for more people, all I got was a polite "So sorry." So, I did
the next best thing and tried to find some organization already in
being which could and would help us. I happened to be expounding my
troubles one day at Air Defense Command Headquarters while I was
briefing General Burgess, ADC's Director of Intelligence, and he told
me about his 4602nd Air Intelligence Squadron, a specialized
intelligence unit that had recently become operational. Maybe it
could help--he'd see what he could work out, he told me.
Now in the military all commitments to do something carry an almost
standard time factor. "I'll expedite it," means nothing will happen
for at least two weeks. "I'll do it right away," means from a month
to six weeks. An answer like, "I'll see what I can work out,"
requires writing a memo that explains what the person was going to
see if he could work out and sealing it in a time capsule for
preservation so that when the answer finally does come through the
future generation that receives it will know how it all started. But
I underestimated the efficiency of the Air Defense Command. Inside of
two weeks General Burgess had called General Garland, they'd
discussed the problem, and I was back in Colorado Springs setting up
a program with Colonel White's 4602nd.
The 4602nd's primary function is to interrogate captured enemy
airmen during wartime; in peacetime all that they can do is
participate in simulated problems. Investigating UFO reports would
supplement these problems and add a factor of realism that would be
invaluable in their training. The 4602nd had field teams spread out
all over the United States, and these teams could travel anywhere by
airplane, helicopter, canoe, jeep, or skis on a minute's notice. The
field teams had already established a working contact with the
highway patrols, sheriffs' offices, police, and the other military in
their respective areas, so they were in an excellent position to
collect facts about a UFO report. Each member of the field teams had
been especially chosen and trained in the art of interrogation, and
each team had a technical specialist. We couldn't have asked for a
better ally.
Project Blue Book was once more back in business. Until the formal
paper work went through, our plan was that whenever a UFO report
worth investigating came in we would call the 4602nd and they would
get a team out right away. The team would make a thorough
investigation and wire us their report. If the answer came back
"Unknown," we would study the details of the sighting and, with the
help of Project Bear, try to find the answer.
A few weeks after the final plans had been made with the 4602nd, I
again bade farewell to Project Blue Book. In a simple ceremony on the
poop deck of one of the flying saucers that I frequently have been
accused of capturing, before a formation of the three-foot-tall green
men that I have equally as frequently been accused of keeping
prisoner, I turned my command over to Al/c Max Futch and walked out
the door into civilian life with separation orders in hand.
The UFO's must have known that I was leaving because the day I found
out that officers with my specialty, technical intelligence, were no
longer on the critical list and that I could soon get out of the
service, they really put on a show. The show they put on is still the
best UFO report in the Air Force files.
I first heard about the sighting about two o'clock on the morning of
August 13, 1953, when Max Futch called me from ATIC. A few minutes
before a wire had come in carrying a priority just under that
reserved for flashing the word the U.S. has been attacked. Max had
been called over to ATIC by the OD to see the report, and he thought
that I should see it. I was a little hesitant to get dressed and go
out to the base, so I asked Max what he thought about the report. His
classic answer will go down in UFO history, "Captain," Max said in
his slow, pure Louisiana drawl, "you know that for a year I've read
every flying saucer report that's come in and that I never really
believed in the things." Then he hesitated and added, so fast that I
could hardly understand him, "But you should read _this_ wire." The
speed with which he uttered this last statement was in itself enough
to convince me. When Max talked fast, something was important.
A half hour later I was at ATIC--just in time to get a call from the
Pentagon. Someone else had gotten out of bed to read his copy of the
wire. I used the emergency orders that I always kept in my desk and
caught the first airliner out of Dayton to Rapid City, South Dakota.
I didn't call the 4602nd because I wanted to investigate this one
personally. I talked to everyone involved in the incident and pieced
together an amazing story.
Shortly after dark on the night of the twelfth, the Air Defense
Command radar station at Ellsworth AFB, just east of Rapid City, had
received a call from the local Ground Observer Corps filter center. A
lady spotter at Black Hawk, about 10 miles west of Ellsworth, had
reported an extremely bright light low on the horizon, off to the
northeast. The radar had been scanning an area to the west, working a
jet fighter in some practice patrols, but when they got the report
they moved the sector scan to the northeast quadrant. There was a
target exactly where the lady reported the light to be. The warrant
officer, who was the duty controller for the night, told me that he'd
studied the target for several minutes. He knew how weather could
affect radar but this target was "well defined, solid, and bright."
It seemed to be moving, but very slowly. He called for an altitude
reading, and the man on the height-finding radar checked his scope.
He also had the target--it was at 16,000 feet.
The warrant officer picked up the phone and asked the filter center
to connect him with the spotter. They did, and the two people
compared notes on the UFO's position for several minutes. But right
in the middle of a sentence the lady suddenly stopped and excitedly
said, "It's starting to move--it's moving southwest toward Rapid."
The controller looked down at his scope and the target was beginning
to pick up speed and move southwest. He yelled at two of his men to
run outside and take a look. In a second or two one of them shouted
back that they could both see a large bluish-white light moving
toward Rapid City. The controller looked down at his scope--the
target was moving toward Rapid City. As all three parties watched the
light and kept up a steady cross conversation of the description, the
UFO swiftly made a wide sweep around Rapid City and returned to its
original position in the sky.
A master sergeant who had seen and heard the happenings told me that
in all his years of duty--combat radar operations in both Europe and
Korea--he'd never been so completely awed by anything. When the
warrant officer had yelled down at him and asked him what he thought
they should do, he'd just stood there. "After all," he told me, "what
in hell could we do--they're bigger than all of us."
But the warrant officer did do something. He called to the F-84
pilot he had on combat air patrol west of the base and told him to
get ready for an intercept. He brought the pilot around south of the
base and gave him a course correction that would take him right into
the light, which was still at 16,000 feet. By this time the pilot had
it spotted. He made the turn, and when he closed to within about 3
miles of the target, it began to move. The controller saw it begin to
move, the spotter saw it begin to move and the pilot saw it begin to
move--all at the same time. There was now no doubt that all of them
were watching the same object.
Once it began to move, the UFO picked up speed fast and started to
climb, heading north, but the F-84 was right on its tail. The pilot
would notice that the light was getting brighter, and he'd call the
controller to tell him about it. But the controller's answer would
always be the same, "Roger, we can see it on the scope."
There was always a limit as to how near the jet could get, however.
The controller told me that it was just as if the UFO had some kind
of an automatic warning radar linked to its power supply. When
something got too close to it, it would automatically pick up speed
and pull away. The separation distance always remained about 3 miles.
The chase continued on north--out of sight of the lights of Rapid
City and the base--into some very black night.
When the UFO and the F-84 got about 120 miles to the north, the
pilot checked his fuel; he had to come back. And when I talked to
him, he said he was damn glad that he was running out of fuel because
being out over some mighty desolate country alone with a UFO can
cause some worry.
Both the UFO and the F-84 had gone off the scope, but in a few
minutes the jet was back on, heading for home. Then 10 or 15 miles
behind it was the UFO target also coming back.
While the UFO and the F-84 were returning to the base--the F-84 was
planning to land--the controller received a call from the jet
interceptor squadron on the base. The alert pilots at the squadron
had heard the conversations on their radio and didn't believe it.
"Who's nuts up there?" was the comment that passed over the wire from
the pilots to the radar people. There was an F-84 on the line ready
to scramble, the man on the phone said, and one of the pilots, a
World War II and Korean veteran, wanted to go up and see a flying
saucer. The controller said, "O.K., go."
In a minute or two the F-84 was airborne and the controller was
working him toward the light. The pilot saw it right away and closed
in. Again the light began to climb out, this time more toward the
northeast. The pilot also began to climb, and before long the light,
which at first had been about 30 degrees above his horizontal line of
sight, was now below him. He nosed the '84 down to pick up speed, but
it was the same old story--as soon as he'd get within 3 miles of the
UFO, it would put on a burst of speed and stay out ahead.
Even though the pilot could see the light and hear the ground
controller telling him that he was above it, and alternately gaining
on it or dropping back, he still couldn't believe it--there must be a
simple explanation. He turned off all of his lights--it wasn't a
reflection from any of the airplane's lights because there it was. A
reflection from a ground light, maybe. He rolled the airplane--the
position of the light didn't change. A star--he picked out three
bright stars near the light and watched carefully. The UFO moved in
relation to the three stars. Well, he thought to himself, if it's a
real object out there, my radar should pick it up too; so he flipped
on his radar-ranging gunsight. In a few seconds the red light on his
sight blinked on--something real and solid was in front of him. Then
he was scared. When I talked to him, he readily admitted that he'd
been scared. He'd met MD 109's, FW 190's and ME 262's over Germany
and he'd met MIG-15's over Korea but the large, bright, bluish-white
light had scared him--he asked the controller if he could break off
the intercept.
This time the light didn't come back.
When the UFO went off the scope it was headed toward Fargo, North
Dakota, so the controller called the Fargo filter center. "Had they
had any reports of unidentified lights?" he asked. They hadn't.
But in a few minutes a call came back. Spotter posts on a southwest-
northeast line a few miles west of Fargo had reported a fast-moving,
bright bluish-white light.
This was an unknown--the best.
The sighting was thoroughly investigated, and I could devote pages
of detail on how we looked into every facet of the incident; but it
will suffice to say that in every facet we looked into we saw
nothing. Nothing but a big question mark asking what was it.
When I left Project Blue Book and the Air Force I severed all
official associations with the UFO. But the UFO is like hard drink;
you always seem to drift back to it. People I've met, people at work,
and friends of friends are continually asking about the subject. In
the past few months the circulation manager of a large Los Angeles
newspaper, one of Douglas Aircraft Company's top scientists, a man
who is guiding the future development of the supersecret Atlas
intercontinental guided missile, a movie star, and a German rocket
expert have called me and wanted to get together to talk about UFO's.
Some of them had seen one.
I have kept up with the activity of the UFO and Project Blue Book
over the past two years through friends who are still in
intelligence. Before Max Futch got out of the Air Force and went back
to law school he wrote to me quite often and a part of his letters
were always devoted to the latest about the UFO's.
Then I make frequent business trips to ATIC, and I always stop in to
see Captain Charles Hardin, who is now in charge of Blue Book, for a
"What's new?" I always go to ATIC with the proper security clearances
so I'm sure I get a straight answer to my question.
Since I left ATIC, the UFO's haven't gone away and neither has the
interest. There hasn't been too much about them in the newspapers
because of the present Air Force policy of silence, but they're with
us. That the interest is still with us is attested to by the fact
that in late 1953 Donald Keyhoe's book about UFO's, _Flying_
_Saucers_ _from_ _Outer_ _Space_, immediately appeared on best seller
lists. The book was based on a few of our good UFO reports that were
released to the press. To say that the book is factual depends
entirely upon how one uses the word. The details of the specific UFO
sightings that he credits to the Air Force are factual, but in his
interpretations of the incidents he blasts way out into the wild blue
yonder.
During the past two years the bulk of the UFO activity has taken
place in Europe. I might add here that I have never seen any recent
official UFO reports or studies from other countries; all of my
information about the European Flap came from friends. But when these
friends are in the intelligence branches of the U.S. Air Force, the
RAF, and the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the data can be considered
at least good.
The European Flap started in the summer of 1953, when reports began
to pop up in England and France. Quality-wise these first reports
weren't too good, however. But then, like a few reports that occurred
early in the stateside Big Flap of 1952, sightings began to drift in
that packed a bit of a jolt. Reports came in that had been made by
personal friends of the brass in the British and French Air Forces.
Then some of the brass saw them. Corners of mouths started down.
In September several radar sites in the London area picked up
unidentified targets streaking across the city at altitudes of from
44,000 to 68,000 feet. The crews who saw the targets said, "Not
weather," and some of these crews had been through the bloody Battle
of Britain. They knew their radar.
In October the crew of a British European Airways airliner reported
that a "strange aerial object" had paced their twin-engined
Elizabethan for thirty minutes. Then on November 3, about two-thirty
in the afternoon, radar in the London area again picked up targets.
This time two Vampire jets were scrambled and the pilots saw a
"strange aerial object." The men at the radar site saw it too;
through their telescope it looked like a "flat, white-coloured tennis
ball."
The flap continued into 1954. In January those people who officially
keep track of the UFO's pricked up their ears when the report of two
Swedish airline pilots came in. The pilots had gotten a good look
before the UFO had streaked into a cloud bank. It looked like a
discus with a hump in the middle.
On through the spring reports poured out of every country in Europe.
Some were bad, some were good.
On July 3, 1954, at eight-fifteen in the morning, the captain, the
officers and 463 passengers on a Dutch ocean liner watched a
"greenish-colored, saucer-shaped object about half the size of a full
moon" as it sped across the sky and disappeared into a patch of high
clouds.
There was one fully documented and substantiated case of a "landing"
during the flap. On August 25 two young ladies in Mosjoen, Norway,
made every major newspaper in the world when they encountered a
"saucer-man." They said that they were picking berries when suddenly
a dark man, with long shaggy hair, stepped out from behind some
bushes. He was friendly; he stepped right up to them and started to
talk rapidly. The two young ladies could understand English but they
couldn't understand him. At first they were frightened, but his smile
soon "disarmed" them. He drew a few pictures of flying saucers and
pointed up in the sky. "He was obviously trying to make a point," one
of the young ladies said.
A few days later it was discovered that the man from "outer space"
was a lost USAF helicopter pilot who was flying with NATO forces in
Norway.
As I've always said, "Ya gotta watch those Air Force pilots--
especially those shaggy-haired ones from Brooklyn."
The reporting spread to Italy, where thousands of people in Rome saw
a strange cigar-shaped object hang over the city for forty minutes.
Newspapers claimed that Italian Air Force radar had the UFO on their
scopes, but as far as I could determine, this was never officially
acknowledged.
In December a photograph of two UFO's over Taormina, Sicily,
appeared in many newspapers. The picture showed three men standing on
a bridge, with a fourth running up with a camera. All were intently
watching two disk-shaped objects. The photo looked good, but there
was one flaw, the men weren't looking at the UFO's; they were looking
off to the right of them. I'm inclined to agree with Captain Hardin
of Blue Book--the photographer just fouled up on his double exposure.
Sightings spread across southern Europe, and at the end of October,
the Yugoslav Government expressed official interest. Belgrade
newspapers said that a "thoughtful inquiry" would be set up, since
reports had come from "control tower operators, weather stations and
hundreds of farmers." But the part of the statement that swung the
most weight was, "Scientists in astronomical observatories have seen
these strange objects with their own eyes."
During 1954 and the early part of 1955 my friends in Europe tried to
keep me up-to-date on all of the better reports, but this soon
approached a full-time job. Airline pilots saw them, radar picked
them up, and military pilots chased them. The press took sides, and
the controversy that had plagued the U.S. since 1947 bloomed forth in
all its confusion.
An ex-Air Chief Marshal in the RAF, Lord Dowding, went to bat for
the UFO's. The Netherlands Air Chief of Staff said they can't be.
Herman Oberth, the father of the German rocket development, said that
the UFO's were definitely interplanetary vehicles.
In Belgium a senator put the screws on the Secretary of Defense--he
wanted an answer. The Secretary of Defense questioned the idea that
the saucers were "real" and said that the military wasn't officially
interested. In France a member of parliament received a different
answer--the French military was interested. The French General Staff
had set up a committee to study UFO reports.
In Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, American Ambassador to Italy, said that
she had seen a UFO and had no idea what it could be.
Halfway around the world, in Australia, the UFO's were busy too. At
Canberra Airport the pilot of an RAAF Hawker Sea Fury and a ground
radar station teamed up to get enough data to make an excellent radar-
visual report.
In early 1955 the flap began to die down about as rapidly as it had
flared up, but it had left its mark--many more believers. Even the
highly respected British aviation magazine, _Aeroplane_, had
something to say. One of the editors took a long, hard look at the
over-all UFO picture and concluded, "Really, old chaps--I don't know."
Probably the most unique part of the whole European Flap was the
fact that the Iron Curtain countries were having their own private
flap. The first indications came in October 1954, when Rumanian
newspapers blamed the United States for launching a drive to induce a
"flying saucer psychosis" in their country. The next month the
Hungarian Government hauled an "expert" up in front of the microphone
so that he could explain to the populace that UFO's don't really
exist because, "all 'flying saucer' reports originate in the
bourgeois countries, where they are invented by the capitalist
warmongers with a view to drawing the people's attention away from
their economic difficulties."
Next the U.S.S.R. itself took up the cry along the same lines when
the voice of the Soviet Army, the newspaper _Red_ _Star_, denounced
the UFO's as, you guessed it, capitalist propaganda.
In 1955 the UFO's were still there because the day before the all-
important May Day celebration, a day when the Soviet radio and TV are
normally crammed with programs plugging the glory of Mother Russia to
get the peasants in the mood for the next day, a member of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences had to get on the air to calm the people's fears.
He left out Wall Street and Dulles this time--UFO's just don't exist.
It was interesting to note that during the whole Iron Curtain Flap,
not one sighting or complimentary comment about the UFO's was made
over the radio or in the newspapers; yet the flap continued. The
reports were obviously being passed on by word of mouth. This fact
seems to negate the theory that if the newspaper reporters and
newscasters would give up the UFO's would go away. The people in
Russia were obviously seeing something.
While the European Flap was in progress, the UFO's weren't entirely
neglecting the United States. The number of reports that were coming
into Project Blue Book were below average, but there were reports.
Many of them would definitely be classed as good, but the best was a
report from a photo reconnaissance B-29 crew that encountered a UFO
almost over Dayton.
About 11:00A.M. on May 24, 1954, an RB-29 equipped with some new
aerial cameras took off from Wright Field, one of the two airfields
that make up Wright-Patterson AFB, and headed toward the Air Force's
photographic test range in Indiana. At exactly twelve noon they were
at 16,000 feet, flying west, about 15 miles northwest of Dayton. A
major, a photo officer, was in the nose seat of the '29. All of the
gun sights and the bombsight in the nose had been taken out, so it
was like sitting in a large picture window--except you just can't get
this kind of a view anyplace else. The major was enjoying it. He was
leaning forward, looking down, when he saw an extremely bright
circular-shaped object under and a little behind the airplane. It was
so bright that it seemed to have a mirror finish. He couldn't tell
how far below him it was but he was sure that it wasn't any higher
than 6,000 feet above the ground, and it was traveling fast, faster
than the B-29. It took only about six seconds to cross a section of
land, which meant that it was going about 600 miles an hour.
The major called the crew and told them about the UFO, but neither
the pilot nor the copilot could see it because it was now directly
under the B-29. The pilot was just in the process of telling him that
he was crazy when one of the scanners in an aft blister called in; he
and the other scanner could also see the UFO.
Being a photo ship, the RB-29 had cameras--loaded cameras--so the
logical thing to do would be to take a picture, but during a UFO
sighting logic sometimes gets shoved into the background. In this
case, however, it didn't, and the major reached down, punched the
button on the intervalometer, and the big vertical camera in the aft
section of the airplane clicked off a photo before the UFO sped away.
The photo showed a circular-shaped blob of light exactly as the
major had described it to the RB-29 crew. It didn't show any details
of the UFO because the UFO was too bright; it was completely
overexposed on the negative. The circular shape wasn't sharp either;
it had fuzzy edges, but this could have been due to two things: its
extreme brightness, or the fact that it was high, close to the RB-29,
and out of focus. There was no way of telling exactly how high it was
but if it were at 6,000 feet, as the major estimated, it would have
been about 125 feet in diameter.
Working with people from the photo lab at Wright-Patterson, Captain
Hardin from Project Blue Book carried out one of the most complete
investigations in UFO history. They checked aircraft flights,
rephotographed the area from high and low altitude to see if they
could pick up something on the ground that could have been reflecting
light, and made a minute ground search of the area. They found
absolutely nothing that could explain the round blob of light, and
the incident went down as an unknown.
Like all good "Unknown" UFO reports, there are as many opinions as
to what the bright blob of light could have been as there are people
who've seen the photo. "Some kind of light phenomenon" is the
frequent opinion of those who don't believe. They point out that
there is no shadow of any kind of a circular object showing on the
ground--no shadow, nothing "solid." But if you care to take the time
you can show that if the object, assuming that this is what it was,
was above 4,000 feet the shadow would fall out of the picture.
Then all you get is a blank look from the light phenomenon theorists.
With the sighting from the RB-29 and the photograph, all of the
other UFO reports that Blue Book has collected and all of those that
came out of the European Flap, the big question--the key question--
is: What have the last two years of UFO activity brought out? Have
there been any important developments?
Some good reports have come in and the Air Force is sitting on them.
During 1954 they received some 450 reports, and once again July was
the peak month. In the first half of 1955 they had 189. But I can
assure you that these reports add nothing more as far as proof is
concerned. The quality of the reports has improved, but they still
offer nothing more than the same circumstantial evidence that we
presented to the panel of scientists in early 1953. There have been
no reports in which the speed or altitude of a UFO has been measured,
there have been no reliable photographs that show any details of a
UFO, and there is no hardware. There is still no real proof.
So a public statement that was made in 1952 still holds true: "The
_possibility_ of the existence of interplanetary craft has never been
denied by the Air Force, _but_ UFO reports offer absolutely no
authentic evidence that such interplanetary spacecraft do exist."
But with the UFO, what is lacking in proof is always made up for in
opinions. To get a qualified opinion, I wrote to a friend, Frederick
C. Durant. Mr. Durant, who is presently the director of a large Army
Ordnance test station, is also a past president of the American
Rocket Society and president of the International Astronautical
Federation. For those who are not familiar with these organizations,
the American Rocket Society is an organization established to promote
interest and research in space flight and lists as its members
practically every prominent scientist and engineer in the
professional fields allied to aeronautics. The International
Astronautical Federation is a world-wide federation of such societies.
Mr. Durant has spent many hours studying UFO reports in the Project
Blue Book files and many more hours discussing them with scientists
the world over--scientists who are doing research and formulating the
plans for space flight. I asked him what he'd heard about the UFO's
during the past several years and what he thought about them. This
was his reply:
This past summer at the Annual Congress of the IAF at Innsbruck, as
well as previous Congresses (Zurich, 1953, Stuttgart, 1952, and
London, 1951), none of the delegates representing the rocket and
space flight societies of all the countries involved had strong
feelings on the subject of saucers. Their attitude was essentially
the same as professional members of the American Rocket Society in
this country. In other words, there appear to be no confirmed saucer
fans in the hierarchy of the professional societies.
I continue to follow the subject of UFO's primarily because of my
being requested for comment on the interplanetary flight aspects. My
personal feelings have not changed in the past four years, although I
continue to keep an objective outlook.
There are many other prominent scientists in the world whom I met
while I was chief of Project Blue Book who, I'm sure, would give the
same answer--they've not been able to find any proof, but they
continue to keep an objective outlook. There are just enough big
question marks sprinkled through the reports to keep their outlook
objective.
I know that there are many other scientists in the world who,
although they haven't studied the Air Force's UFO files, would limit
their comment to a large laugh followed by an "It can't be." But "It
can't be's" are dangerous, if for no other reason than history has
proved them so.
Not more than a hundred years ago two members of the French Academy
of Sciences were unseated because they supported the idea that
"stones had fallen from the sky." Other distinguished members of the
French Academy examined the stones, "It can't be--stones don't fall
from the sky," or words to that effect. "These are common rocks that
have been struck by lightning."
Today we know that the "stones from the sky" were meteorites.
Not more than fifty years ago Dr. Simon Newcomb, a world-famous
astronomer and the first American since Benjamin Franklin to be made
an associate of the Institute of France, the hierarchy of the world
science, said, "It can't be." Then he went on to explain that flight
without gas bags would require the discovery of some new material or
a new force in nature.
And at the same time Rear Admiral George W. Melville, then Chief
Engineer for the U.S. Navy, said that attempts to fly heavier-than-
air vehicles was absurd.
Just a little over ten years ago there was another "it can't be." Ex-
President Harry S. Truman recalls in the first volume of the Truman
_Memoirs_ what Admiral William D. Leahy, then Chief of Staff to the
President, had to say about the atomic bomb. "That is the biggest
fool thing we have ever done," he is quoted as saying. "The bomb will
never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."
Personally, I don't believe that "it can't be." I wouldn't class
myself as a "believer," exactly, because I've seen too many UFO
reports that first appeared to be unexplainable fall to pieces when
they were thoroughly investigated. But every time I begin to get
skeptical I think of the other reports, the many reports made by
experienced pilots and radar operators, scientists, and other people
who know what they're looking at. These reports were thoroughly
investigated and they are still unknowns. Of these reports, the radar-
visual sightings are the most convincing. When a ground radar picks
up a UFO target and a ground observer sees a light where the radar
target is located, then a jet interceptor is scrambled to intercept
the UFO and the pilot also sees the light and gets a radar lock-on
only to have the UFO almost impudently outdistance him, there is no
simple answer. We have no aircraft on this earth that can at will so
handily outdistance our latest jets.
The Air Force is still actively engaged in investigating UFO
reports, although during the past six months there have been definite
indications that there is a movement afoot to get Project Blue Book
to swing back to the old Project Grudge philosophy of analyzing UFO
reports--write them all off, regardless. But good UFO reports cannot
be written off with such answers as fatigued pilots seeing a balloon
or star; "green" radar operators with _only_ fifteen years'
experience watching temperature inversion caused blips on their
radarscopes; or "a mild form of mass hysteria or war nerves." Using
answers like these, or similar ones, to explain the UFO reports is an
expedient method of getting the percentage of unknowns down to zero,
but it is no more valid than turning the hands of a clock ahead to
make time pass faster. Twice before the riddle of the UFO has been
"solved," only to have the reports increase in both quantity and
quality.
I wouldn't want to hazard a guess as to what the final outcome of
the UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that within a few years
there will be a proven answer. The earth satellite program, which was
recently announced, research progress in the fields of electronics,
nuclear physics, astronomy, and a dozen other branches of the
sciences will furnish data that will be useful to the UFO
investigators. Methods of investigating and analyzing UFO reports
have improved a hundredfold since 1947 and they are continuing to be
improved by the diligent work of Captain Charles Hardin, the present
chief of Project Blue Book, his staff, and the 4602nd Air
Intelligence Squadron. Slowly but surely these people are working
closer to the answer--closer to the proof.
Maybe the final proven answer will be that all of the UFO's that
have been reported are merely misidentified known objects. Or maybe
the many pilots, radar specialists, generals, industrialists,
scientists, and the man on the street who have told me, "I wouldn't
have believed it either if I hadn't seen it myself," knew what they
were talking about. Maybe the earth is being visited by
interplanetary spaceships.
Only time will tell.