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.



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

And They're Still Flying

[Transcriber's Note: The following three chapters were added to the second edition text in 1960.]

Four years have passed since the first seventeen chapters of this book were written. During this period hundreds of unidentified flying objects have been seen and reported to the Air Force. Pilots, with thousands of hours of flying time are still reporting them; radar operators, experts in their field, are still tracking them; and crews on the missile test ranges are photographing them.

UFO's are not just a fad.

The Air Force's Project Blue Book is still very active. Not a week passes that one of the many teams of its nation wide investigation net is not in the field investigating a new UFO report.

To pick up the history of the UFO the best place to start is Cincinnati, Ohio, in the late summer of 1955. For some unknown reason, one of those mysterious factors of the UFO, reports from this Hamilton County city suddenly began to pick up. Mass hysteria, the old crutch, wasn't a factor because neither the press, the radio nor TV was even mentioning the words "flying saucer."

The reports weren't much in terms of quality. Some lady would see a "bobbing white light"; or a man, putting his car away, would see a "star jump." These reports, usually passed on to the Air Force through the Air Defense Command's Ground Observer Corps, merely went on the UFO plotting board as a statistic.

But before long, in a matter of a week or two, the mass of reports began to draw some official attention because the Ground Observer Corps spotters themselves began to make UFO reports. At times during the middle of August the telephone lines from the GOC observation posts in Hamilton County (greater Cincinnati) to the filter center in Columbus would be jammed. Now, even the most cynical Air Force types were be-grudgingly raising their eyebrows. These GOC observers were about as close to "experts" as you can get. Many had spent hundreds of hours scanning the skies since the GOC went into the operation in 1952 to close the gaps in our radar net. Many held awards for meritorious service. They weren't crackpots.

But still the cynics held out. This was really nothing new. The Project Blue Book files were full of similar incidents. In 1947 there had been a rash of reports from the Pacific Northwest; in 1948 there had been a similar outbreak at Edwards Air Force Base, the supersecret test center in the Mojave Desert of California; in 1949 the sightings centered in the midwest. None had panned out to be anything.

Then came the clincher.

On the night of August 23rd, shortly before midnight, reports of a UFO began to come in from the Mt. Healthy GOC observation post northwest of Cincinnati. Almost simultaneously, Air Defense Command radar picked up a target in that area. A minute or two later the Forestville and Loveland GOC posts, also in Hamilton County, made sightings. Now, three UFO's, described as brilliant white spheres, swinging in a pendulum-like motion, were on the ADC plotting boards- confirmed by radar. All pretext of ignoring the UFO's was dropped and at 11:58P.M., F-84's of the Ohio Air National Guard were scrambled. They were over Cincinnati at 12:10A.M. and made contact. Boring in at 20,000 feet, at 100% power, they closed but the UFO's left them as if they were standing still.

The battle in the Cincinnati sector was on.

Almost every night more UFO's were reported by the GOC. Attempts were made to scramble interceptors but there were no more radar contacts and a jet interceptor without ground guidance is worthless.

At the height of this activity it was decided that more information was needed by the Air Defense Command. Maybe from a mass of data something, some kind of clue, could be sifted out. The answer: establish a special UFO reporting post. The man to operate this post was tailor-made.

On September 9, Major Hugh McKenzie of the Columbus Filter Center contacted Leonard H. Stringfield in Cincinnati. Stringfield, besides being a very public minded citizen, was also known as a level-headed "saucer expert." Sooner or later, usually sooner, he heard about every UFO sighting in Hamilton County. He was given a code, "Foxtrot Kilo 3-0 Blue," which provided him with an open telephone line to the ADC Filter Center in Columbus. He was in business but he didn't have to build up a clientele—it was there.

For the next few months Stringfield did yeoman duty as Cincinnati's one-man UFO center by sifting out the wheat from the chaff and passing the wheat on to the Air Force. As he told me the other day, half his nights were spent in his backyard clad in shorts and binoculars. Fortunately his neighbors were broad-minded and the UFO's picked relatively warm nights to appear.

Most of the reports Stringfield received were duds. He lost track of the number. The green, red, blue, gold and white; discs, triangles, squares and footballs which hovered, streaked, zigzagged and jerked, turned out to be Venus, Jupiter, Arcturus and an occasional jet. A fiery orange satellite which hovered for hours turned out to be the North Star viewed through a cheap telescope, and the "whole formation of space ships" were the Pleiades.

Then it happened again.

On the evening of March 23rd Stringfield's telephone rang. It was Charles Deininger at the Mt. Healthy GOC post. They had a UFO in sight off to the east. Could Stringfield see it? He grabbed his extension phone and ran outdoors. There, off to the east, were two, large, low flying lights. One of the lights was a glowing green and the other yellow. They were moving north.

"Airplane!"

This was Stringfield's first reaction but during World War II he had made the long trek up the Pacific with the famous Fifth Air Force and he immediately realized that if it was an airplane it would have to be very close because of the large distance between the lights. And, as a clincher, no sound came through the still night.

He dialed the long distance operator and said the magic words, "This is Foxtrot Kilo Three Dash Zero Blue." Seconds later he was talking to the duty sergeant at the Columbus Filter Center. A few more seconds and the sergeant had his story.

Another jet was scrambled and this time Stringfield, via a radiotelephone hookup to the airplane, gave the pilot a vector. Stringfield heard the jet closing in but since it was a one-way circuit he couldn't hear the pilot's comments.

Once again the UFO took off.

This was a fitting climax for the Cincinnati flap. As suddenly as it began it quit and from the mass of data that was collected the Air Force got zero information.

In the mystery league the UFO's were still ahead.

Although the majority of the UFO activity during the last half of 1955 and early 1956 centered in the Cincinnati area there were other good reports.

Near Banning, California, on November 25, 1955, Gene Miller, manager of the Banning Municipal Airport and Dr. Leslie Ward, a physician, were paced by a "globe of white light which suddenly backed up in midair," while in Miller's airplane. It was the same old story: Miller was an experienced pilot, a former Air Force instructor and air freight pilot with several thousand hours flying time.

Commercial pilots came in for more than their share of the sightings in 1956.

On January 22, UFO investigators talked to the crew of a Pan American airliner. That night, at 8:30P.M., the Houston to Miami DC- 7B had been "abeam" of New Orleans, out over the Gulf of Mexico. There was a partial moon shining through small wisps of high cirrus clouds but generally it was a clear night. The captain of the flight was back in the cabin chatting with the passengers; the co-pilot and engineer were alone on the flight deck. The engineer had moved up from his control panel and was sitting beside the co-pilot.

At 8:30 it was time for a radio position report and the co-pilot, Tom Tompkins, leaned down to set up a new frequency on the radio controls. Robert Mueller, the engineer, was on watch for other aircraft. It was ten, maybe twenty seconds after Tompkins leaned down that Mueller just barely perceived a pinpoint of moving light off to his right. Even before his thought processes could tell him it might be another airplane the light began to grow in size. Within a short six seconds it streaked across the nose of the airliner, coming out of the Gulf and disappearing inland over Mississippi or Alabama. Tompkins, the co-pilot, never saw it because Mueller was too astounded to even utter a sound.

But Mueller had a good look. The body of the object was shaped like a bullet and gave off a "pale, luminescent blue glow." The stubby tail, or exhaust, was marked by "spurts of yellow flame or light."

The size? Mueller, like any experienced observer, had no idea since he didn't know how far away it was. But, it was big!

One sentence, dangling at the bottom of the report was one I'd seen many, many times before: "Mr. Mueller was a complete skeptic regarding UFO reports."

During 1956 there was a rumor—I heard it many times—that the Air Force had entered into a grand conspiracy with the U.S. news media to "stamp out the UFO." The common people of the world, the rumor had it, were not yet psychologically conditioned to learn that we had been visited by superior beings. By not ever mentioning the words "unidentified flying object" the public would forget and go on their merry, stupid way. I heard this rumor so often, in fact, that I began to wonder myself. But a few dollars invested in Martinis for old buddies in the Kittyhawk Room of the Biltmore Hotel in Dayton, or the Men's bar in the Statler Hotel in Washington, produces a lot of straight and reliable information—much better than you get through official channels. There was no "silence" order I learned, only the same old routine. If the files at ATIC were opened to the public it would take a staff of a dozen people to handle all the inquiries.

Secondly, many of the inquiries come from saucer screwballs and these people are like a hypochondriac at the doctor's; nothing will make them believe the diagnosis unless it is what they came in to hear. And there are plenty of saucer screwballs.

One officer summed it up neatly when he told me, "It isn't the UFO's that give us the trouble, it's the people."

As a double check I called several newspaper editors the other day and asked, "Why don't you print more UFO stories?" The answers were simple, it's the old "dog bites man" bit—ninety-nine per cent have no news value any more.

On May 10, 1956, the man bit the dog.

A string of UFO sightings in Pueblo, Colorado, hit the front pages of newspapers across the United States. Starting on the night of May 5th, for six nights, the citizens of Pueblo, including the Ground Observer Corps, saw UFO's zip over their community. As usual there were various descriptions but everyone agreed "they'd never seen anything like it before."

On the sixth night, the Air Force sent in an investigator and he saw them. Between the hours of 9:00P.M. and midnight he saw six groups of triangular shaped objects that glowed "with a dull fluorescence, faint but bright enough to see." They passed from horizon to horizon in six seconds.

The next day this investigator was called back to Colorado Springs, his base, and a fresh team was sent to Pueblo.

The man really chomped down on the dog in July and the UFO really made headlines.

Maybe it was because a fellow newspaper editor was involved, along with the Kansas Highway Patrol, the Navy and the Air Force. Or, maybe it was simply because it was a good UFO sighting.

About the time Miss Iowa was being judged Miss USA in the 1956 Miss Universe Pageant at Long Beach, the city editor of Arkansas City Daily Traveler, and a trooper of the Kansas State Highway Patrol were sitting in a patrol cruiser in Arkansas City. It was a hot and muggy night. Occasionally the radio in the cruiser would come to life. An accident near Salina. A drunk driving south from Topeka. Another accident near Wichita. But generally South Central Kansas was dead. The newspaper editor was about ready to go home—it was 10 o'clock—when the small talk he and the trooper had been making was brought to an abrupt finale by three high pitched beeps from the cruiser's radio. An important "all cars bulletin" was coming. Twenty- five years as a newspaperman had trained the editor to always be on the alert for a story so he reached down and turned up the volume. Within seconds he had his story.

"The Hutchinson Naval Air Station is picking up an unidentified target on their radar," the voice of the dispatcher said, with as much of an excited tone as a police dispatcher can have. "Take a look."

Then the dispatcher went on to say that the target was moving in a semi-circular area that reached out from 50 to 75 miles east of Hutchinson. A B-47 from McConnell AFB at Wichita was in the area, searching. The last fix on the object showed it to be near Emporia, in Marion County.

The two men in the patrol cruiser looked at each other for a second or two. Like all newspaper editors, this man had had his bellyful of flying saucer reports—but this was a little different.

"Let's go out and look," he said, fully doubting that they would see anything.

They drove to a hill in the north part of the city where they could get a good view of the sky and parked. In a few minutes an Arkansas City police car joined them.

It was a clear night except for a few wispy clouds scattered across the north sky.

They waited, they looked and they saw.

Shortly before midnight, off to the north, appeared "a brilliantly lighted, teardrop shaped, blob of light." "Prongs, or streams of bright light, sprayed downward from the blob toward the earth." It was big, about the size of a 200 watt light bulb.

As the group of men silently watched, the weird light continued to drift and for many minutes it moved vertically and horizontally over a wide area of the sky. Then it faded away.

As one of the men later told me, "I was glad to see it go; I was pooped."

The next morning literally hundreds of people spent hours conjecturing and describing. After all these years of talk they'd actually seen one. Several photos, showing the big blob of light, were shown around, and two fishermen readily admitted they'd packed up their poles and tackle boxes and headed home when they saw it.

Editor Coyne summed up the feeling of hundreds of Kansans when he said: "I have tended to discount the stories about flying objects, but, brother, I am now a believer."

What was it? First of all it was confusion. Early the next morning Air Force investigators flooded the area asking the questions: "What size was it in comparison to a key or a dime?" "Would it compare in size to a light bulb?" "Was there any noise?"

As soon as they left, the military tersely announced that no radar had picked up any target and no B-47's had been sent out. Then they pulled the plugs on the incoming phone lines. The confusion mounted when newsmen tapped their private sources and learned that a B-47 had been sent into the area.

A few days later the Air Force told the Kansans what they'd seen: The reflection from burning waste gas torches in a local oil field.

This was greeted with the Kansan version of the Bronx Cheer.

Nineteen hundred fifty-six was a big year for Project Blue Book. According to an old friend, Captain George Gregory, who was then Chief of Blue Book, they received 778 reports. And through a lot of sleepless nights they were able to "solve" 97.8% of them. Only 17 remained "unknowns."

Digging through the reports for 1956, outside of the ones already mentioned, there were few real good ones.

In Banning, California, Ground Observer Corps spotters watched a "balloon-like object make three rectangular circuits around the town." In Plymouth, New Hampshire, two GOC spotters reported "a bright yellow object which left a trail, similar to a jet, moving slowly at a very high altitude." At Rosebury, Oregon, State Police received many reports of "funny green and red lights" moving slowly around a television transmitter tower. And in Hartford, Connecticut, two amateur astronomers, looking at Saturn through a 4-inch telescope, were distracted by a bright light. Turning their telescope on it they observed a "large, whitish yellow light, shaped like a ten gallon hat." Many other people evidently saw the same UFO because the local newspaper said, "reports have been pouring in."

In Miami, a Pan American Airlines radar operator tracked a UFO at speeds up to 4000 miles an hour. Five of his skeptical fellow radar operators watched and were confirmed.

At Moneymore, Northern Ireland, a "level-headed and God fearing" citizen and his wife captured an 18-inch saucer by putting a headlock on it. They started to the local police station, but put the saucer down to climb over a hedge, and it went whirling off to the hinterlands of space.

The 27th Air Defense Division that guards the vast aircraft and missile centers of Southern California was alerted on the night of September 9. In rapid succession, a Western Airlines pilot making an approach to Los Angeles International Airport, the Ground Observer Corps, and numerous Los Angeles citizens called in a white light moving slowly across the Los Angeles basin. When the big defense radars on San Clemente Island picked up an unknown target in the same area that the light was being reported two F-89 jet interceptors were scrambled but saw nothing.

A few days later investigators learned that a $27.65 weather balloon had caused the many thousand dollars' worth of excitement.

The matter of scrambling interceptors has been a sore point with the UFO business for a long time. Many people believe that the mere fact the Air Force will send up two, three, or even four aircraft that cost $2000 an hour to fly is proof positive that the Air Force doesn't believe its own story that UFO's don't exist.

The official answer you'll get, if you ask the Air Force, is that they scramble against any unknown target as a matter of defense. But over coffee you get a different answer. They write the UFO scrambles off as training cost. Each pilot has to get so much flying time and simulating intercepts against an unidentified light is more interesting than merely "burning holes in the air."

If appropriations are ever cut to the point where training must be curtailed, and Heaven forbid, there will be no more scrambles after flying saucers.

And the colonel who told me this was emphatic.

The year 1957 was heralded in by a startling announcement which ended a long dry spell of UFO news.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., Retired Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney made a statement. Newspapers across the country carried it complete, or in part, and people read the statement with interest because Admiral Fahrney is well known as a sensible and knowledgeable man. He had fought for and built up the Navy's guided missile program back in the days when people who talked of ballistic missiles and satellites had to fight for their beliefs.

First, Admiral Fahrney announced that a non-profit organization, the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) had been established to investigate UFO reports. He would be chairman of the board of governors and his board would consist of such potent names as:

Retired Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, for two years the director of the supersecret Central Intelligence Agency.

Retired Lieutenant General P. A. del Valle, ex-commanding general of the famous First Marine Division.

Retired Rear Admiral Herbert B. Knowles, noted submariner of World War II.

Then Admiral Fahrney read a statement regarding the policies of NICAP. It was as follows:

"Reliable reports indicate that there are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds . . . No agency in this country or Russia is able to duplicate at this time the speeds and accelerations which radars and observers indicate these flying objects are able to achieve.

"There are signs that an intelligence directs these objects because of the way they fly. The way they change position in formations would indicate that their motion is directed. The Air Force is collecting factual data on which to base an opinion, but time is required to sift and correlate the material.

"As long as such unidentified objects continue to navigate through the earth's atmosphere, there is an urgent need to know the facts. Many observers have ceased to report their findings to the Air Force because of the seeming frustration—that is, all information going in, and none coming out. It is in this area that NICAP may find its greatest mission.

"We are in a position to screen independently all UFO information coming in from our filter groups.

"General Albert C. Wedemeyer will serve the Committee as Evaluations Adviser and complete analyses will be arranged through leading scientists. After careful evaluation, we shall release our findings to the public."



Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps Major, and author of three top seller UFO books, was appointed director. The mere fact that another civilian UFO investigative group was being born was neither news nor UFO history because since 1947 well over a hundred such organizations had been formed. Many still exist; many flopped. But none deserve the niche in UFO history that does NICAP. NICAP had power and it raised a storm that took months to calm down.

NICAP got off to a fast start. Dues were pegged at $7.50 a year, which included a subscription to the very interesting magazine The UFO Investigator, and the operation went into high gear.

With such names as Fahrney, Wedemeyer, Hillenkoetter, Del Valle and Knowles for prestige, and Keyhoe for intrigue, saucer fans all over the United States packaged up their seven-fifty and mailed it to headquarters. Each, in turn, became a "listening post" and an "investigator."

Keyhoe set up a Panel of Special Advisors, all saucer fans, to "impartially evaluate" the UFO reports ferreted out by the "listening posts," based on facts uncovered by the "investigators."

Even though the "leading scientists" Fahrney mentioned in his statement never materialized NICAP was cocked, primed, and ready.

To get things off to a gala start Keyhoe, as director of NICAP, wrote to the Air Force and set out NICAP's Eight Point Plan. In essence this plan suggested (some say demanded) that the Air Force let NICAP ride herd on Project Blue Book.

First of all, NICAP wanted its Panel of Special Advisors to review and concur with all of the conclusions on the thousands of UFO reports that the Air Force had in its files.

This went over like a worm in the punch bowl.

First of all, the Air Force didn't feel it was necessary to review its files. Secondly, they knew NICAP. If every balloon, planet, airplane, and bird that caused a UFO report hadn't been captured and a signed confession wrung out, the UFO would be a visitor from outer space.

The Air Force decided to ignore NICAP.

But NICAP wouldn't be ignored. They bombarded everyone from the Secretary of the Air Force on down with telephone calls, telegrams and letters.

Still the Air Force remained silent.

Then NICAP headquarters called in the troops and members from all corners of the nation cut loose. The barrage of mail broke the log jam and just enough information to constitute an answer dribbled out of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force.

But this didn't satisfy Keyhoe or his UFO hungry NICAPions. They wanted blood and that blood had to taste like spaceships or they wouldn't be happy. The cudgel they picked up next was powerful.

The Air Force had said that there was nothing classified about Project Blue Book yet NICAP hadn't seen every blessed scrap of paper in the Air Force UFO files. This was unwarranted censorship!

While Congress was right in the middle of such important and crucial problems as foreign policy, atomic disarmament, racketeering, integration and a dozen and one other problems, NICAP began to bedevil every senator and representative who was polite enough to listen.

It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease and in November 1957, the United States Senate Committee on Government Operations began an inquiry concerning UFO's.

I gave my testimony and so did others who had been associated with Project Blue Book.

A few weeks later the inquiry was dropped.

But NICAP had made its name. Of all of the thorns that have been pounded into the UFO side of the Air Force, NICAP drove theirs the deepest.

In the midst of all this mess Admiral Fahrney, General Wedemeyer and General del Valle, politely, and quietly, resigned from NICAP's board of governors.

Neither the loss of these famous names nor the defeat at the hands of the Air Force has stopped NICAP. They continue to forge ahead, undaunted.

In many UFO incidents they have actually uncovered additional, and sometimes interesting, information.

NICAP Director Don Keyhoe has taken a beating, being accused of profiteering, trying to make headlines, and other minor social crimes. But personally I doubt this. Keyhoe is simply convinced that UFO's are from outer space and he's a dedicated man.

While the big NICAP-Air Force battle was going on the UFO's were not waiting to see who won. They were still flying.

At Ellington AFB, Texas, a Ground Observer Corps team spotted a UFO and passed it on to a radar crew. Although the radar crew couldn't pick it up on their sets they saw it visually. The lieutenant in charge told investigators how it crossed from horizon to horizon in 45 seconds.

On March 9, several passengers on a New York to San Juan, Porto Rico airliner were injured when the pilot pulled the big DC-6 up sharply to miss a "large, greenish white, clearly circular-shaped object" which was on a collision course with the plane. The pilots of several other airliners in the same airway confirmed the sighting.

Two weeks later jet interceptors were scrambled over Los Angeles to look for a UFO.

According to the records, the first report of the brilliant and mysterious, flashing, red light came from a man in the east part of Pasadena. But his report was quickly lost in the shuffle as more and more calls began to come in. As the flashing light crossed the Los Angeles Basin from southeast to northwest hundreds of people saw it. Traffic was tied up on the Rose Parade famous Colorado Boulevard as drivers stopped their cars to get out and look. As it neared the Air Defense Command Filter Center in Pasadena the filter center personnel, those that could be spared, went out and looked. They saw it. Police switchboards lit up a solid red as it crossed the San Gabriel Valley.

Near midnight a CAA radar picked up unidentified targets near the Oxnard AFB, at Oxnard, California (northwest of Los Angeles), and at almost that identical time people on the airbase saw the light

This did it, and two powerful jets, equipped with all weather radar, came screaming into the area.

But it was the same old story—no contact—the UFO was gone.

The midwest was visited on the morning of May 23rd, when five observers in Kansas City saw four silver, disc-shaped objects flying in formation at extremely high speed. At one point during their flight two of the objects broke formation and veered off but soon rejoined. It took the objects only four minutes to cross the sky.

There were other reports during the first half of 1957, 250 of them to be exact, and many could be classified as "good." But they were nothing compared to those that were to come.

On November 3, 1957, a rash of sightings broke out in Texas and they had a brand new twist. To do things up right the powers that guide the UFO picked the town of Levelland only 27 miles west of Lubbock, the home of the now traditional "Lubbock Lights."

It was with a tug of nostalgia that I read about these reports because five years before, almost to the day, Lubbock had plunged the Air Force, and me, into the UFO mystery on a grand scale.

According to the best interpretation of the maze of conflicting stories, facts and rumors about these famous sightings the only positive fact is that there were scattered storm clouds across West Texas on the night of November 4, 1957. This was unusual for November and everyone in the community was just a little edgy.

It was early in the evening, at least early for West Texas on a Saturday night, when Pedro Saucedo, a farm worker, and his friend Joe Salaz, started out in Saucedo's truck toward Pettit, ten miles northwest of Level-land. They had just turned off State Highway 116 and were heading north on a country road when the two men saw a flash of light in an adjacent field. Saucedo, a Korean War Veteran, and Salaz didn't pay much attention to the light at first. They only noticed that it was coming closer. "It seemed to be paralleling us and edging a little closer all the time," Saucedo later recalled. Still neither man paid any attention to the light. They drove on, Saucedo watching the road and Salaz talking.

Then it hit.

The first signal of something wrong was when the truck's headlights went out; then the engine stopped. Before Saucedo could hit the starter again he glanced over his left shoulder. A huge ball of fire was "rapidly drifting" toward the truck. Without a second's hesitation Saucedo did what the Korean War had taught him to do when in doubt, he shoved open the car door and hit the dirt.

Salaz just sat.

"The 'Thing' passed directly over my truck with a great sound and rush of wind," Saucedo later told County Sheriff Weir Clem, after he'd started his truck and had driven back to Levelland. "It sounded like thunder and my truck rocked from the blast. I felt a lot of heat."

The "Thing," which disappeared across the prairie, looked like a "fiery tornado."

Five years before and a little east of where Saucedo and Salaz were "buzzed" I had talked to two women who described almost an identical UFO. And it remains "unknown" to this day.

In Levelland, the two men's story would have been enough to keep Sheriff Clem busy for the rest of the night but between the hours of 8:15P.M. and midnight on the 2nd the "Levelland Thing" struck five more times.

James D. Long, a Waco truck driver, came upon "it" four miles west of Levelland and fainted as it roared over his truck. Ronald Martin, another truck driver, was stopped east of Levelland, as was Newell Wright, a Texas Tech student. Jim Wheeler, Jose Alvarez and Frank Williams added their stories to the melee.

All of those who had been attacked told Sheriff Clem a similar story: "The 'Thing' was shaped something like an egg standing on end. It was fiery red, more like a red neon light. It was about 200 feet long and was about 200 feet in the air. When it came close to cars the engines would stop and the lights would go out."

"Everyone," Sheriff Clem said, "seemed very excited."

That night everyone in West Texas saw UFO's. Sheriff Clem saw a brilliant light in the distance. Highway patrolmen Lee Hargrove and Floyd Cavin reported similar brilliant lights at the same time but from a different location. The control tower operators at the Amarillo Airport, to the north, saw a "blue, gaseous object which moved swiftly and left an amber trail."

There were dozens more. It was a memorable Saturday night in Levelland.

But unbeknown to Sheriff Clem or the residents of West Texas, they weren't alone on the visitor's list.

At 2:30A.M. on Sunday morning, only a few hours after the "Thing" raised havoc around Levelland, an army military police patrol was cruising the supersecret White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.

Here is their report as they gave it to Air Force UFO investigators:

"At approximately 0230, 3 November 1957, Source, together with PFC ———, were on a routine patrol of the up range area of the White Sands Proving Ground when Source noticed a 'very bright' object high in the sky. This object slowly descended to an altitude estimated to be approximately 50 yards where it remained motionless for about 3 minutes, then it descended to the ground where the light went out. The object was not blurred or fuzzy, emitted no vapor or smoke. The object was in view for about 10 minutes, and Source estimated that it was approximately 2 or 3 miles away. It was estimated to be between 75 and 100 yards in diameter and shaped like an egg. Source stated that it was as large as a grapefruit held at arm's length. The weather was cold, drizzling and windy, and Source stated no stars were visible. After the light went out Source and PFC ——— continued north to the STALLION SITE CAMP and reported the incident to the Sergeant of the Guard who returned to the area but failed to find anything."

The flap was on.

On Monday, the 4th, the "Levelland Thing" struck again near the White Sands Proving Ground. James Stokes, a 20-year Navy veteran, and an electronics engineer, had the engine of his new Mercury stopped as "a brilliant, egg-shaped" object made a pass at the highway. As it went over, Stokes said, "it felt like the radiation of a giant sun lamp."

Stokes said there were ten other carloads of people stopped but if this is true no one ever found out who they were.

The Air Force wrote off Stokes' story as, "Hoax, presumably suggested by the Levelland, Texas, reports."

Maybe the Air Force didn't believe James Stokes but when the Coast Guard Cutter Seabago radioed in their report from the Gulf of Mexico wheels began to turn—fast.

On Tuesday morning, the 5th, the Seabago was about 200 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River on a northerly heading. At 5:10A.M. her radar picked up a target off to the left at a distance of about 14 miles. This was really nothing unusual because they were under heavily traveled air lanes.

The early morning watch is always rough and as the small group of officers and men in the Combat Information Center quietly watched the target, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, it moved south, made a turn, and headed back to the north again. A few of the men noticed that the turn looked "a little different," but this early in the morning they didn't give it much thought.

At 5:14 the target went off the scope to the north.

At 5:16 it was back and the lassitude was instantly gone. Now the target was 22 miles south of the ship. No one in the CIC had to draw a picture. Something, in two minutes, had disappeared off the scope to the north, made a big swing around the ship, out of radar range, and had swung in from the south!

Word went up to the lookouts. They tensed up and began to scan the sky.

The radar contacts continued.

This second contact, south of the ship, was held for two full minutes as the target moved out from 22 to 55 miles. Then it faded.

At 5:20 the target was back but now it was north of the ship again, and it was hovering!

Again the lookouts were called. Could they see anything now? Their "No" answers didn't hold for long because seconds later their terse reports began to come into the CIC. A "brilliant light, like a planet" was streaking across the northwest sky about 30 degrees above the horizon. Unfortunately the radar had lost contact for a moment when the visual report came in.

At 5:37 the target disappeared from the scopes and was gone for good.

The Seabago Case was ended but the UFO's continued to fly.

Reports continued to come into the Air Force and a lot of investigators lost a lot of sleep.

The next day at 3:50P.M. the C.O. of an Air Force weather detachment at Long Beach, California, and twelve airmen watched six saucer- shaped UFO's streak along under the bases of a 7000 foot high cloud deck.

On the same day, also in Long Beach, officers and men at the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station saw UFO's almost continuously between the hours of 6:05 and 7:25P.M.

Long Beach police reported "well over a hundred calls" during this same period.

During November and December of 1957 it was a situation of you name the city and there was a UFO report from there. Trying to sift them out and put them in a book would be like sorting out a plateful of spaghetti. And if you succeeded you would have a document the size of the New York City telephone directory.

Most of the reports were explained.

The Levelland, Texas, sightings were written off as "St. Elmo's Fire." The military police at the White Sands Proving Ground saw the moon through broken clouds and the crew of the Coast Guard ship Seabago were actually tracking several separate aircraft.

The 1957 flap was as great as the previous record breaking 1952 flap. During 1957 the Air Force received 1178 UFO reports. Of these, only 20 were placed on the "unknown" list.

In comparison to 1957, the first months of 1958 were a doldrums. Reports drifted in at a leisurely pace and the Air Force UFO investigating teams, blooded during the avalanche of 1957, picked off solutions like knocking off clay pipes in a shooting gallery.

In Los Angeles, a few clear nights drove the Air Defense Command nuts. People could actually see the sky and the sight of so many stars frightened them.

Unusual atmospherics in Georgia made stars jump and radars go crazy; and a balloon, hanging over Chicago at dusk, cost the taxpayers another several thousand dollars but the pilots made their flight pay.

A statement by Dr. Carl Jung, renowned Swiss psychologist, was widely publicized in July 1958. Dr. Jung was quoted as saying, in a letter to a U.S. saucer club, "UFO's are real." When Dr. Jung read what he was supposed to have written the Alps rang with screams of "misquote."

No one got excited until the early morning of September 29th.

Shortly before dawn on that day a confusing mess of reports began to pour into the Air Force. Some came from the Washington, D.C., area. People right in NICAP's backyard told of seeing a "large, round, fiery object" shoot across the sky from southeast to northwest. A few excited observers, all from the country northwest of Washington, "had seen it land" and even as they telephoned in their reports they could see it glowing behind a neighbor's barn.

Other reports, also of a "huge, round, fiery object," came in from such places as Pittsburgh, Somerset, and Bedford, all in Pennsylvania; and Hagerstown and Frederick in Maryland. To add to the confusion, people in Pennsylvania reported seeing three objects "flying in formation."

When the dust settled Air Force investigators took the first step in the solution of any UFO report. They plotted the sightings on a map, and collated the directions of flight, descriptions and times of observation. It was obvious that the object had moved along a line between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. It was traveling about 7000 miles an hour and everyone had obviously seen the same object. By the time it had passed into Pennsylvania it had split into three objects.

But the hooker was the reported landings northeast of Washington. Too many people had reported a glow on the ground to write this factor off even though an investigator, dispatched to the scene shortly after dawn, had found nothing in the way of evidence.

One possibility was that some unknown object had streaked across the sky, landed and then took off again.

Could be, but it wasn't.

The next night the case broke. The glow from the landing was a bright floodlight on a barn. No one had ever really noticed it before until the object passed nearby.

A few days later the object itself was identified. From the many identical descriptions Project Blue Book's astrophysicist pinned it down as a large meteor. The meteor had broken up near the end of its flight to produce the illusion of three objects flying in formation.

Of all the 590 UFO reports the Air Force received in 1958, probably the weirdest was solved before it was ever reported.

About four o'clock on the afternoon of October 2, 1958, three men were standing in a group, talking, outside a tungsten mill at Danby, California, right in the heart of the Mojave Desert The men had been talking for about five minutes when one of them, who happened to be facing the northwest, stopped right in the middle of a sentence and pointed. The other two men looked and to their astonishment saw a brilliant glow of light. It was so close to the horizon that it was difficult to tell if it was on the horizon or in the air just above it.

At first the men ignored the light but as it persisted they became more interested. They'd all heard "flying saucer" stories and, they later admitted, this possibility entered their minds.

As they watched they speculated. It could be something natural but all of them had been around this area for months and they'd never seen this light before. About the time they decided to get a telescope and take a closer look the light suddenly faded.

All the next day the men kept glancing off toward the northwest as they worked but the clear blue sky was blank. Then, at 4:00P.M., the light was back. This time they had a telescope.

All the men took turns looking at the object and all agreed that it was about 15 feet long, 5 feet high and solid. It looked like the sun reflecting off shiny metal. It was about four miles away, they estimated, and almost exactly on the horizon.

Now the men's curiosity was thoroughly whetted. Martian spaceship or whatever, they were going after it. But a several-hour search of the area produced nothing. And, as soon as they left the mill they lost sight of the object.

Darkness brought the search to a halt.

The next day at 4:00P.M. a crowd had gathered and the UFO kept its appointment. Again the men studied the object and tension ran high.

Someone had resurrected the stories of UFO's landing in the desert. At the time they'd sounded absurd but now, standing there looking at a UFO, it was different.

A party of men were all ready to jeep out into the desert to make another search when one of them made a discovery. There were guy wires coming out of the UFO and running down into the trees. Other people looked. And then the solution hit like a fireball.

Exactly in line with the UFO, and ten miles away, not four, was a set of antennas for the California State Highway Patrol radio. The sun's rays were reflecting from these antennas. They'd never seen this before because on only a few days during the year was the sun at exactly the right angle to produce the reflection.

The men were right. In a few days the Danby UFO left and it never came back.

Nineteen hundred fifty-eight was not a record year for UFO's. The 590 reports received didn't stack up to the 1178 for 1957, or the 778 for 1956, or the 918 for 1952. But a new record was set when the percentage of unknowns was pared down to a new low. During 1958 only 9/10 of one per cent of the reports, or 5 reports, were classified as "unknown."

More manpower, better techniques, and just plain old experience has allowed the Air Force to continually lower the percentage of "unknowns" from 20%, while I was in charge of Project Blue Book, to less than 1%, today.

No story of the UFO would be complete without describing one of these unknowns, so here's one exactly as it came out of the Project Blue Book files:

"On 31 October 1958, this Center received a TWX reporting an UFO near Lock Raven Dam. A request for a detailed investigation was sent to the nearest Air Force Base. The following is a summary of the incident and subsequent investigation:

"Two civilians were driving around near Lock Raven Dam on the evening of 26 October 1958. When they rounded a curve about 200 to 300 yards from a bridge they saw what appeared to be a large, flat, egg shaped object hovering about 100 to 150 feet above the bridge superstructure. They slowed their car and when they got to within 75 or 80 feet of the bridge their engine quit and their lights went out. The driver immediately stepped on the brakes and stopped the car. Attempts were made to start the car and when this was unsuccessful they became frightened and got out of the car. They put the car between them and the object and watched for approximately 30 to 45 seconds. The object then seemed to flash a brilliant white light and both men felt heat on their faces. Then there was heard a loud noise and the object began rising vertically. The object became very bright while rising and its shape could not be seen as it rose. It disappeared in five to ten seconds.

"After the object disappeared, the car was started and they turned it around and drove to where a phone was located and contacted the Towson Police Department. Two patrolmen were sent to meet them. The two men told the patrolmen of their experience. The witnesses then noticed a burning sensation on their faces and became concerned about possible radiation burns. They went to a Baltimore Hospital for an examination. Both witnesses were advised by the doctor that they had no reason for concern.

"An extensive investigation was made concerning this incident. However, no valid conclusion could be made as to the possible nature of the sighting and it remains unidentified."

So ended 1958 and in its final tally of sightings for the year Project Blue Book added a new space age touch—earth satellites had accounted for eleven UFO reports.

Nineteen hundred fifty-nine came in with a good one. We used to call these reports "Ground-air-visual-radar" sightings and they make interesting reading.

At Duluth, Minnesota, in March, it's dark by five o'clock in the evening. It's cold. The temperature hovers around zero and it's so clear you have a feeling you can almost reach up and touch the stars.

It was this kind of a night on March 13, 1959, and as the officers and men of the Air Defense Command fighter squadron at the Duluth Municipal Airport moved, they shuffled along slowly because the heavy parkas and arctic clothing they wore were heavy.

Then came the UFO report and things speeded up.

At 5:20P.M., exactly, the operations officer noted the time, word came in over the comm line that someone had sighted an unidentified flying object off to the north. Word flashed around the squadron and as people rushed out of buildings to look they were joined by those already outside.

And there it was: big, round and bright, and it was moving at high speed. Some observers thought it was "greenish," others "reddish," but it was something and it was there.

The bearing was 300 degrees from the base.

It was an awesome sight and it became even more awesome when a quick call to an adjacent radar site brought back the word that they had just picked up a target on a bearing of 300 degrees from the air base. They were tracking it and taking scope photos.

In the alert hangar, the two pilots standing the alert had been listening to a running account of the sighting so when the scramble bell rang they took off for their airplanes like a couple of sprinters.

As the two big alert hangar doors swung up the whining screech of the jet starters, followed by thunder of the engines, filled the airfield. The atmosphere around the Duluth Municipal Airport was closely akin to Santa Anita the instant the starting gates open.

I've been around when jet interceptors scramble and you can twang the tension with your finger.

As the people on the ground watched they could first see the flame of the jet's afterburner disappear into the night. Then the jet's navigation lights faded out on a bearing of 300 degrees.

At the radar site they still had the target and there were many excited people watching the big pale, orange scopes as two little bright points of light began to close on a bigger blob of light.

Then the pilots gave the "Tally-ho"—they were in visual contact.

But the "Tally-ho" had no more been given than the big blob of light on the target began to pull away from the fighters and was soon off the scope.

The pilots kept visual contact, though, and the radio provided the details of the chase to the now blind crew in the radar room.

The two jets bored north, with afterburner on, and the needles on their machmeters passed the "1.0" mark. But still the UFO was just as far away as it had ever been.

The chase went on for a few minutes more before the pilots pulled their throttles back into the cruise position, turned, and came home.

Even before they landed, the people at the airbase saw the big, round and bright UFO rapidly begin to fade and then it was gone.

So ended the glamour and the dog work began.

Each man who had seen the UFO visually was carefully interrogated. Weather reports were collected. Radarscope photos were developed. The two pilots received special attention. The exact bearing of the UFO was measured and 300 degrees magnetic was correct.

The bundle of data was packed up and sent to Project Blue Book. The panel of experts convened.

First, the radarscope photos were examined.

"Those targets could be interference from other radars," said the radar expert, and he mentally ticked off a dozen and one other similar cases of known interference. The weather data, and locations and frequencies of other radars were checked out.

Beyond doubt it was interference from another radar that caused the target.

Now, the visual sighting.

Balloon? No, the fighters could have caught a balloon in seconds.

Airplane? Same answer. These jets were the fastest things in the air.

Planet or star? Out came the almanacs and the puzzle went to the astrophysicist. Venus was on a bearing of 300 degrees from the Duluth Municipal Airport at 5:20P.M. on March 23rd. But Venus was just below the horizon at that time and the observers said the UFO was "moving fast."

Once again the weather charts were studied. The atmospheric conditions were such that it was very possible that due to refraction Venus would have been visible just on the horizon. The fact that the UFO faded so fast would bear this out because the conditions for such refraction are critical and a slight change in atmospheric conditions could easily have caused the planet to disappear.

The speed—a common illusion. Further interrogation of the observers showed it had never moved.

So, the history of the UFO is almost brought up to date.



CHAPTER NINETEEN

Off They Go into the Wild Blue Yonder

At 12:30P.M. on Thursday, November 20, 1952, history was made.

At least, so says George Adamski, lecturer on philosophy and student of technical matters and astronomy.

At 12:30P.M. on Thursday, November 20, 1952, George Adamski was the first man on earth to talk to a Venusian.

At least, so says George Adamski.

I was chief of Project Blue Book at the time and the name "Professor Adamski"—he had a title then—wasn't new to me. He, or some of his followers had been showering the Air Force with photos of flying saucers. Letters by the gross were coming in demanding recognition of the great professor and an analysis of his photos.

We obliged and the photos were examined by the experts at Wright- Patterson Photo Reconnaissance Labs. The verdict came back: "They could be genuine, of course, but they also could have been easily faked by a ten year old with a Brownie camera."

For a few weeks we forgot George Adamski. But then the press began to clamor at our gates. The news was leaking out of Southern California. George Adamski had talked to a Venusian! We held out for a long time but the pressure mounted and I headed for California to find out what it was all about.

As far as George Adamski was concerned I was just another thirsty sight-seer from the famous observatory on Mt. Palomar when I walked into the little restaurant at the foot of this famous mountain one day in 1953.

The four stool restaurant, with a few tables, where Adamski worked as a handyman, was crowded when I arrived and he was circulating around serving beer and picking up empty bottles. There was no doubt as to who he was because his fame had spread. To the dozen almost reverently spoken queries, "Are you Adamski?" he modestly nodded his head.

Small questions about the flying saucer photos for sale from convenient racks led to more questions and before long the good "professor" had taken a position in the middle of the room and was off and running.

In his slightly broken English he told how he was the son of poor, Polish immigrants with hardly any formal education.

To look at the man and to listen to his story you had an immediate urge to believe him. Maybe it was his appearance. He was dressed in well worn, but neat, overalls. He had slightly graying hair and the most honest pair of eyes I've ever seen.

Or maybe it was the way he told his story. He spoke softly and naively, almost pathetically, giving the impression that "most people think I'm crazy, but honestly, I'm really not."

Adamski started his story by telling how he had spent many long and cold nights at his telescope "at the request of the government" trying to photograph one of the flying saucers everyone had been talking about. He'd been successful, as the full photograph racks on the wall showed, and he thought the next step would be to actually try to contact a saucer.

For some reason, Adamski didn't know exactly why, on November 19th he'd decided to go out into the Mojave Desert. He'd called some friends and told them to meet him there.

By noon the next day the party, which consisted of Adamski and six others, had met and were eating lunch near the town of Desert Center on the California-Arizona border.

They looked for saucers, but except for an occasional airplane, the cloudless blue sky was empty. They were about ready to give it up as a bad day when another airplane came over. Again they looked up, but this time, in addition to seeing the airplane, they saw a silvery, cigar-shaped "flying saucer."

For some reason, again he didn't know why, the group of people moved down the road where Adamski left them and took off into the desert alone.

By this time the "space ship" had disappeared and once again Adamski was about to give up.

Then, a flash of light caught his eye and a smaller saucer (he later learned it was a "scout ship") came drifting down and landed about a half mile from him. He swung his camera into action and started to take pictures. Unfortunately, the one picture Adamski had to show was so out of focus the scout ship looked like a desert rock.

He took a few more pictures, he told his audience, and had stopped to admire the little scout ship when he suddenly noticed a man standing nearby.

Now, even those in the crowded restaurant who had been smirking when he started his story had put down their beers and were listening. This is what they had come to hear.

You could actually have heard the proverbial pin drop.

Adamski told what went through his mind when he first saw the man— maybe a prospector. But he noticed the man's long, shoulder-length, sandy-colored hair, his dark skin, his Oriental features and his ski- pant type trousers. He was puzzled.

Then it came into his mind like a flash, he was looking at a person from some other world!

Through mental pictures, sign language, and a few words of English, Adamski found out the man was from Venus, he was friendly, and that they (the Venusians) were worried about radiation from our atomic bombs.

They talked. George pointed to his camera but the man from Venus politely refused to be photographed. Adamski pleaded to go into the "ship" to see how it operated but the Venusian refused this, too.

They talked some more—of spaceships and of solar systems—before Adamski walked with his new found friend to the saucer and saw the Venusian off into space.

At this point Adamski recalled how he had glanced up in the sky to see the air full of military aircraft.

Needless to say, the rest of Adamski's party, who had supposedly seen the "contact" from a mile away, were excited. They rushed up to him and it was then that they noticed the footprints.

Plainly imprinted in the desert sand were curious markings made by ridges on the soles of the Venusian's shoes.

At the urging of the crowd in the restaurant Adamski took an old shoe box out from under the counter. One of his party, that day, had just happened to have some plaster of paris and the shoe box contained plaster casts of shoe prints with strange, hieroglyphic- like symbols on the soles. No one in the restaurant asked how the weight of a mere man could make such sharp imprints in the dry, coarse desert sand.

Next he showed the sworn statements of the witnesses and the crowd moved in around him for a better look.

As I left he was graciously filling people in on more details and the cash register was merrily ringing up saucer picture sales.

I didn't write the trip off as a complete loss, the weather in California was beautiful.

Adamski held the UFO spotlight for some time.

The Venusians paid him another visit, this time at the restaurant, and he photographed their "ship." This, whether by Venusian fate or design, increased the flow of traffic to the restaurant at the base of Mt. Palomar.

It also had its side effects.

An astronomer from the observatory that houses the world famous 200- inch telescope on top of Mt. Palomar told me: "I hate to admit it but the number of week end visitors has picked up here. People drive down to hear George and decide that since they're down here they might as well come up and see our establishment."

But George Adamski didn't hold the front center of the stage for long. In rapid succession others stepped forward and hesitantly admitted that they too had been contacted.

Truman Bethurum, a journeyman mechanic of Redondo Beach, California, was next up.

Actually, he admitted, he had been the first earthman to talk to a person from another world. Back on the night of July 26, 1952, four months before Adamski, a group of eight or ten, short, olive-skinned men with black wavy hair, had awakened him while he was asleep in a truck in the desert near Mormon Flats, Nevada.

These little men, unlike Adamski's, spoke any language.

"You name it," they'd quipped to Bethurum, "we speak it."

In a newspaper article that was voted "Best Read of 1953," Bethurum told how the little men he met had been more cooperative and had actually taken him into their saucer, a huge job 300 feet in diameter and 16 feet high.

Once inside, Bethurum had met the captain of the "scow"—a true leader of men. Aura Rhanes was her name and she was a Venus de Milo with arms and warm blood. "When she spoke her words rhymed." They chatted and Bethurum learned that he was on the "Admiral's scow" the command ship of Clarion's fleet of saucers.

All in all, Bethurum made eleven visits to Aura's scow. Each time they'd sit and talk. Bethurum told her about the earth and she told of the idyllic, Shangri-La type planet of Clarion—a yet undiscovered planet which is always opposite the moon.

But before too long, both Truman Bethurum and George Adamski had to move over. Daniel Fry, an engineer, stepped in.

At a press conference to kick off the International Saucer Convention in Los Angeles, Fry told how he had not only contacted the spacemen two years before Adamski and Bethurum, he had actually ridden in a flying saucer.

It had all started on the night of July 4, 1950, when engineer Fry was temporarily employed at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.

It was a hot night, and with nothing else to do, Fry decided to take a walk across the desert. He hadn't traveled far when he saw a bluish light hovering over the mountains which rim this famous proving ground. He paid no attention. He'd heard flying saucer stories before and just plain didn't believe them.

But as he watched, the light came closer and closer and closer, until a weird craft came silently to rest on the desert floor not seventy feet away.

For seconds, Fry, who had seen missile age developments at White Sands that would have dumfounded most laymen, merely stood and stared.

The object, Fry told newsmen, was an "ovate spheroid about thirty feet at the equator." (Fry has a habit of drifting off into the technical). Its outside surface was a highly polished silver with a slight violet iridescent glow.

At first Fry wanted to run but his rigid technical training overrode his common, natural urges. He decided to go over to the object and see what made it tick.

He circled it several times and nothing broke the desert silence. Then he touched it.

"Better not touch that hull, pal, it's hot," boomed a voice in a Hollywoodian tone.

Fry recoiled.

The voice softened and added, "Take it easy, pal, you're among friends."

After politely reading off the spaceman, or whoever he was, for scaring him, pal Fry and the voice settled down for a friendly moonlight chat. Fry learned that the voice was indeed that of a spaceman and they were down to pick up a new supply of air. After about four years of earth air transfusions, according to the spaceman, they would become adapted to our atmosphere, and our gravity, and become "immunized to your bi-otics." The craft, Fry was told, was a "cargo carrier," unmanned and built to zoom down and scoop up earth air.

The conversation went on, waxing technical at times, and ended with an invitation to look into the ship. Then the spaceman, possibly carried away by all the interest Fry was showing, offered a ride.

Fry accepted and they antidemagnetized off for New York City. Thirty minutes later they were back at White Sands.

Over New York City they came down from 35 to 20 miles and Fry could read the marquee of the Fulton Theater. "The Seven Year Itch" was playing.

He hadn't told the Air Force about his ride before because he was afraid he'd lose his job. But, at the press conference, he did plug his new book, The White Sands Incident.

By this time Adamski had already published his book Flying Saucers Have Landed and it looked as if Fry was going to cut him out. But Fry took a lie detector test on a widely viewed West Coast television show and flunked it flat.

His stock dropped as fast as it had risen but the decline was somewhat checked when a well known Southern California medium wrote to "her old friend" J. Edgar Hoover about the situation. Hoover, the story goes, shot back an answer—lie detectors are no good.

But the damage had been done. The "rigged" lie detector test had unfortunately relegated Daniel Fry, "engineer," "missile expert," "part owner of an engineering plant," and interplanetary hitchhiker to the bush league.

With Adamski and Bethurum on the stage and Fry peeking out of the wings all hell broke loose.

One could say that everyone tried to get into the act, but I'd rather think that each colony of space people tried to promote their own candidate.

In England, one Cedric Allingham met a Martian on the moors. In France, Germany, the United States, Portugal, Brazil, Spain— everywhere—people "too uneducated to pull a hoax" met green men, dark men, white men, big men with little heads, little men with big heads and men with pointed heads. They wore motorcycle belts, baggy pants, diver suits, and were naked.

One lady proudly announced that a Venusian had tried to seduce her and within days another snorted in disgust. A Martian had seduced her.

Then Adamski took a hop through outer space and back.

Saucers poured forth words of wisdom via radio, light beams and mental telepathy. All of these messages were duly recorded on tape and sales were hot at $4.50 per 10-minute tape.

Not to be outdone by any other lousy planet, the Venusians picked up a young man from Los Angeles and actually took him to Venus. Not once, but three times.

He packed in audiences by telling how he had been contacted one night and asked by a "strange man" if he would go on an important mission. Afraid, but not one to shirk his patriotic duties, he met the stranger at a prearranged spot and was whisked off to Venus. During a high level conference up there he was given the word: Tell the earthlings to lay off their atomic weapons, or else. They're killing all our doves and we make our flying saucers out of the feathers our live doves shed.

The Venusians, this space traveler warned his audiences, were already infiltrating the earth and he intimated that they were ready to move in case we didn't cease atomic testing.

His next two trips to Venus were purely social.

The highlight of his lecture, when he awes his audience, is when he whips out his proof: (1) a blood smear on a slide—genuine Venusian blood, (2) an affidavit from his landlady stating he wasn't home on three occasions, and (3) a photo of a Venusian walking in Los Angeles' McArthur Park. The mere fact that the Venusian looks like any Joe Doakes walking down the street is a picayunish point. Venusians look just like us.

And it hasn't stopped. During the big UFO flap of 1957 a man stumbled onto a landed saucer and chatted awhile with its occupants. A few months later, soon after the atomic powered U.S.S. Nautilus made its historic trip under the polar ice cap, this same man snorted in disgust. He packed his suitcase and started on a lecture tour. Months before he'd been there in a flying saucer.

Once again people shelled out hard cash to hear his story.

Wherever you are, Mr. P. T. Barnum, you are undoubtedly grinning from ear to ear.

But there is a sober side to this apparently comical picture. The common undertone to many of these stories "hot from the lips of a spaceman" is Utopia. On these other worlds there is no illness, they've learned how to cure all diseases. There are no wars, they've learned how to live peaceably. There is no poverty, everyone has everything he wants. There is no old age, they've learned the secret of eternal life.

Too many times this subtle pitch can be boiled down to, "Step right up folks and put a donation in the pot. I'm just on the verge of learning the spaceman's secrets and with a little money to carry out my work I'll give you the secret."

I've seen a man, crippled by arthritis, hobbling out into the desert in hopes that his "friend who talks to the Martians" could get them to cure him on their next trip. I've seen pensioners, who needed every buck they had, shell out money to "help buy radio equipment" to contact some planet to find out how they'd solved their economic problems. I saw a little old lady in a many times mended dress put down a ten dollar bill to help promote a "peace campaign" backed by the Venusians. She'd lost two sons in the war but had four grandsons she wanted to keep alive. A couple died and left $15,000 to a man to build a "longevity machine" so others could live. The Martians had given him the plans.