It was on the night of December 1918, with unusually high winds sweeping across the airfield. At times the gusts reached almost seventy miles an hour. Suddenly a weird ball of light flashed into view, at a height of a thousand feet. As the men on the base watched it, astonished, the mysterious light abruptly shot skyward. In an incredibly short time, it reached an alt.i.tude of twenty thousand feet and vanished.

"Was there any shape outlined behind the light?" I asked the Seattle man.

"n.o.body saw any," he replied. "It looked just like I said--a ball of light, going like a streak."

"Did it leave any smoke behind it?"

"You mean like an engine, or a jet?" He shook his head. "Not a thing.

And it didn"t make a sound--even when it shot up like that."

"Did you hear any guesses about it, or reports later on?"

"Some major who didn"t see it said it must have been

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a balloon. Anybody with brains could see that was screwy. No balloon ever went up that fast--and besides, the thing was going against the wind."

The second incident occurred at Salmon Dam, Idaho, on August 13, 1947.

When I heard the date, it sounded familiar. I checked my sightings file and saw it was the same day as the strange affair at Twin Falls, Idaho.

In the Twin Falls case, the disk was sighted by observers in a canyon.

There was one interesting difference from the usual description. This disk was sky-blue, or else its gleaming surface somehow reflected the sky because of the angle of vision. Although it was not close to the treetops, the observers were amazed to see the trees whip violently when the disk raced overhead, as though the air was boiling from the object"s swift pa.s.sage.

At Salmon Dam, that same day, two miners heard an odd roaring sound and stared into the sky. Several miles away, two brightly gleaming disks were circling at high speed.

"It was like two round mirrors whirling around the sky," one of the men was later quoted as saying. "They couldn"t have been any ordinary planes; not round like that. And they were going too fast."

During this part of my trip, I also was told that one saucer had fallen into a mountain lake. This came to me secondhand. The lone witness was said to have rushed over to his car to get his camera as the disk approached. When it plunged toward the lake, he was so startled that he failed to snap the picture until the moment it struck. This story sounded so flimsy that I didn"t bother to list it.

Months later, a Washington newsman confirmed at least part of the lake story. When he first related it, I thought he had fallen for a gag.

"I heard that yarn," I said. "Don"t tell me you believe it?"

"I come from Idaho," he told me. "And I happen to know the fellow who took the picture. Maybe it wasn"t a disk, but something fell into that lake."

"Did you see the picture?"

"Yes, at the Pentagon." At my surprised look, he added,

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"That was long before they clamped down. I was talking to an Air Force officer about this lake thing, and he showed me the picture."

"What did it look like?"

"You couldn"t tell much about it-just a big splash and a blur where something went under. Maybe a magnifying gla.s.s would bring it out, but I didn"t get a chance to try it."

It was early in 1950 when he told me this. I asked at the Pentagon if this picture was in the Wright Field files, and if so whether I could see it. My inquiries drew blank looks. No one remembered such a photograph. And even if it were in the Project "Saucer" files, I couldn"t see it.

This was more than two months after Project "Saucer" had been officially closed and its secrets presumably all revealed.

The rest of my interviews during this 1949 trip helped to round out my picture of Project "Saucer" operations.

Some witnesses seemed afraid to talk; a few flatly refused. I found no proof of official pressure, but I frequently had the feeling that strong hints had been dropped.

Though one or two witnesses showed resentment at investigators"

methods, most of them seemed more annoyed at the loss of time involved. One man had been checked first by the police, then by the sheriff"s office; an Air Force team had spent hours questioning him, returning the next day, and finally the F.B.I. had made a character check. What he told me about the Air Force interrogation confirmed one of Art Green"s statements.

"One Intelligence captain tried to tell me I"d seen a weather balloon.

I called up the airport and had them check on release schedules. They said next day it didn"t fit any schedules around this area. Anyway, the wind wasn"t right, because the thing I saw was cutting into the wind at a forty-five-degree angle."

Other witnesses told me that investigators had suggested birds, meteors, reflections on clouds, shooting stars, and starsh.e.l.ls as probable explanations of what they had seen. I learned of one pilot who had been

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startled by seeing a group of disks racing past his plane. Air Force investigators later suggested that he had flown through a flock of birds, or perhaps a cl.u.s.ter of balloons,

On the flight back to Washington, I reread all the information the Air Force had released on Project "Saucer." Suddenly a familiar phrase caught my eye. I read over the paragraph again:

"Preliminary study of the more than 240 domestic and thirty foreign incidents by Astro-Physicist Hynek indicates that an over-all total of about 30% can probably be explained away as astronomical phenomena."

Explained away .

I went through the report line by line. On page 17 I found this:

"Available preliminary reports now indicate that a great number of sightings can be explained away as ordinary occurrences which have been misrepresented as a result of human errors."

On page 22 I ran onto another use of the phrase:

"The obvious explanation for most of the spherical-shaped objects reported, as already mentioned, is that they are meteorological or similar type balloons. This, however, does not explain reports that they travel at high speed or maneuver rapidly. But "Saucer" men point out that the movement could be explained away as an optical illusion or actual acceleration of the balloon caused by a gas leak and later exaggerated by observers. . . . There are scores of possible explanations for the scores of different type sightings reported."

Explained away . . . It might not mean anything. It could be just an unfortunate choice of words. But suppose that the real mission of Project "Saucer" was to cover up something. Or that its purpose was to investigate something serious, at the same time covering it up, step by step. The Project "Saucer" teams, then, would check on reports and simultaneously try to divert attention from the truth, suggesting various answers to explain the sightings. Back at Wright Field, a.n.a.lysts and Intelligence officers would go over the general picture and try to work up plausible explanations, which, if necessary, could even be published.

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"Explaining away" would be one of the main purposes of Project personnel. These words would probably be used in discussions of ways and means; they would undoubtedly would be used in secret official papers. And since this published preliminary report had been made up from censored secret files, the use of those familiar words might have been overlooked, since, read casually, they would appear harmless. If the report had been thrown together hastily, the use of these telltale words could be easily understood, and so could the report"s strange contradictions.

As an experiment, I fixed the idea firmly in mind that Project "Saucer" was a cover-up unit. Then I went back once more and read the items quoted above. The effect was almost startling.

It was as though I were reading confidential suggestions for diverting attention and explaining away the sightings; suggestions made by Project members and probably circulated for comment.

"Now, wait a minute," I said to myself. "You may be dreaming up this whole thing."

Trying to get back to a neutral viewpoint, I skimmed through the other details of Project operations, as described in the report.

The order creating Project "Saucer" was signed on December 30, 1947.

(The actual code name was not "Saucer," but since for some reason the Air Force still has not published the name, I have followed their usage of "Saucer" in its place.)