About midmorning on Tuesday, July 29th, Major General John Samford sent word down that he would hold a press conference that afternoon in an attempt to straighten out the UFO situation with the press.

Donald Keyhoe reports on the press conference and the events leading up to it in detail in his book, _Flying_ _Saucers_ _from_ _Outer_ _s.p.a.ce_. He indicates that before the conference started, General Samford sat behind his big walnut desk in Room 3A138 in the Pentagon and battled with his conscience. Should he tell the public "the real truth"--that our skies are loaded with s.p.a.ceships? No, the public might panic. The only answer would be to debunk the UFO"s.

This bit of reporting makes Major Keyhoe the greatest journalist in history. This beats wire tapping. He reads minds. And not only that, he can read them right through the walls of the Pentagon. But I"m glad that Keyhoe was able to read the General"s mind and that he wrote the true and accurate facts about what he was really thinking because I spent quite a bit of time talking to the General that day and he sure fooled me. I had no idea he was worried about what he should tell the public.

When the press conference, which was the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II, convened at 4:00P.M., General Samford made an honest effort to straighten out the Washington National Sightings, but the cards were stacked against him before he started. He had to hedge on many answers to questions from the press because he didn"t know the answers. This hedging gave the impression that he was trying to cover up something more than just the fact that his people had fouled up in not fully investigating the sightings.

Then he had brought in Captain Roy James from ATIC to handle all the queries about radar. James didn"t do any better because he"d just arrived in Washington that morning and didn"t know very much more about the sightings than he"d read in the papers. Major Dewey Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who had been at the airport during the sightings, were extremely conspicuous by their absence, especially since it was common knowledge among the press that they weren"t convinced the UFO"s picked up on radars were weather targets.

But somehow out of this chaotic situation came exactly the result that was intended--the press got off our backs. Captain James"s answers about the possibility of the radar targets" being caused by temperature inversions had been construed by the press to mean that this was the Air Force"s answer, even though today the twin sightings are still carried as unknowns.

The next morning headlines from Bangor to Bogota read:

AIR FORCE DEBUNKS SAUCERS AS JUST NATURAL PHENOMENA

The Washington National Sightings proved one thing, something that many of us already knew: in order to forestall any more trouble similar to what we"d just been through we always had to get all of the facts and not try to hide them. A great deal of the press"s interest was caused by the Air Force"s reluctance to give out any information, and the reluctance on the part of the Air Force was caused by simply not having gone out to find the answers.

But had someone gone out and made a more thorough investigation a few big questions would have popped up and taken some of the intrigue out of the two reports. It took me a year to put the question marks together because I just picked up the information as I happened to run across it, but it could have been collected in a day of concentrated effort.

There was some doubt about the visual sighting of the "large fiery- orange-colored sphere" that the tower operators at Andrews AFB saw when the radar operators at National Airport told them they had a target over the Andrews Radio range station. When the tower operators were later interrogated they completely changed their story and said that what they saw was merely a star. They said that on the night of the sighting they "had been excited." (According to astronomical charts, there were no exceptionally bright stars where the UFO was seen over the range station, however. And I heard from a good source that the tower men had been "persuaded" a bit.)

Then the pilot of the F-94C changed his mind even after he"d given the press and later told me his story about vainly trying to intercept unidentified lights. In an official report he says that all he saw was a ground light reflecting off a layer of haze.

Another question mark arose about the lights that the airline pilots saw. Months after the sighting I heard from one of the pilots whom the ARTC controllers called to learn if he could see a UFO. This man"s background was also impressive, he had been flying in and out of Washington since 1936. This is what he had to say:

The most outstanding incident happened just after a take-off one night from Washington National. The tower man advised us that there was a UFO ahead of us on the take-off path and asked if we would aid in tracking it down. We were given headings to follow and shortly we were advised that we had pa.s.sed the UFO and would be given a new heading. None of us in the c.o.c.kpit had seen anything unusual. Several runs were made; each time the tower man advised us we were pa.s.sing the UFO we noticed that we were over one certain section of the Potomac River, just east of Alexandria. Finally we were asked to visually check the terrain below for anything which might cause such an illusion. We looked and the only object we could see where the radar had a target turned out to be the Wilson Lines moonlight steamboat trip to Mount Vernon. Whether there was an alt.i.tude gimmick on the radar unit at the time I do not know but the radar was sure as h.e.l.l picking up the steamboat.

The pilot went on to say that there is such a conglomeration of lights around the Washington area that no matter where you look you see a "mysterious light."

Then there was another point: although the radars at Washington National and Andrews overlap, and many of the targets appeared in the overlap area, only once did the three radars simultaneously pick up a target.

The investigation brought out a few more points on the pro side too.

We found out that the UFO"s frequently visited Washington. On May 23 fifty targets had been tracked from 8:00 p.m. till midnight. They were back on the Wednesday night between the two famous Sat.u.r.day- night sightings, the following Sunday night, and again the night of the press conference; then during August they were seen eight more times. On several occasions military and civilian pilots saw lights exactly where the radar showed the UFO"s to be.

On each night that there was a sighting there was a temperature inversion but it was never strong enough to affect the radar the way inversions normally do. On each occasion I checked the strength of the inversion according to the methods used by the Air Defense Command Weather Forecast Center.

Then there was another interesting fact: hardly a night pa.s.sed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn"t an inversion in Washington, yet the slow-moving, "solid" radar targets appeared on only a few nights.

But the one big factor on the pro side of the question is the people involved--good radar men--men who deal in human lives. Each day they use their radar to bring thousands of people into Washington National Airport and with a responsibility like this they should know a real target from a weather target.

So the Washington National Airport Sightings are still unknowns.

Had the press been aware of some of the other UFO activity in the United States during this period, the Washington sightings might not have been the center of interest. True, they could be cla.s.sed as good reports but they were not the best that we were getting. In fact, less than six hours after the ladies and gentlemen of the press said "Thank you" to General Samford for his press conference, and before the UFO"s could read the newspapers and find out that they were natural phenomena, one of them came down across the Canadian border into Michigan. The incident that occurred that night was one of those that even the most ardent skeptic would have difficulty explaining.

I"ve heard a lot of them try and I"ve heard them all fail.

At nine-forty on the evening of the twenty-ninth an Air Defense Command radar station in central Michigan started to get plots on a target that was coming straight south across Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron at 625 miles an hour. A quick check of flight plans on file showed that it was an unidentified target.

Three F-94"s were in the area just northeast of the radar station, so the ground controller called one of the F-94"s and told the pilot to intercept the unidentified target. The F-94 pilot started climbing out of the practice area on an intercept heading that the ground controller gave him. When the F-94 was at 20,000 feet, the ground controller told the pilot to turn to the right and he would be on the target. The pilot started to bring the F-94 around and at that instant both he and the radar operator in the back seat saw that they were turning toward a large bluish-white light, "many times larger than a star." In the next second or two the light "took on a reddish tinge, and slowly began to get smaller, as if it were moving away."

Just then the ground controller called and said that he still had both the F-94 and the unidentified target on his scope and that the target had just made a tight 180-degree turn. The turn was too tight for a jet, and at the speed the target was traveling it would have to be a jet if it were an airplane. Now the target was heading back north. The F-94 pilot gave the engine full power and cut in the afterburner to give chase. The radar operator in the back seat got a good radar lock-on. Later he said, "It was just as solid a lock-on as you get from a B-36." The object was at 4 miles range and the F-94 was closing slowly. For thirty seconds they held the lock-on; then, just as the ground controller was telling the pilot that he was closing in, the light became brighter and the object pulled away to break the lock-on. Without breaking his transmission, the ground controller asked if the radar operator still had the lock-on because on the scope the distance between two blips had almost doubled in one sweep of the antenna. This indicated that the unknown target had almost doubled its speed in a matter of seconds.

For ten minutes the ground radar followed the chase. At times the unidentified target would slow down and the F-94 would start to close the gap, but always, just as the F-94 was getting within radar range, the target would put on a sudden burst of speed and pull away from the pursuing jet. The speed of the UFO--for by this time all concerned had decided that was what it was--couldn"t be measured too accurately because its bursts of speed were of such short duration; but on several occasions the UFO traveled about 4 miles in one ten- second sweep of the antenna, or about 1,400 miles an hour.

The F-94 was getting low on fuel, and the pilot had to break off the chase a minute or two before the UFO got out of range of the ground radar. The last few plots on the UFO weren"t too good but it looked as if the target slowed down to 200 to 300 miles an hour as soon as the F-94 turned around.

What was it? It obviously wasn"t a balloon or a meteor. It might have been another airplane except that in 1952 there was nothing flying, except a few experimental airplanes that were far from Michigan, that could so easily outdistance an F-94. Then there was the fact that radar clocked it at 1,400 miles an hour. The F-94 was heading straight for the star Capella, which is low on the horizon and is very brilliant, but what about the radar contacts? Some people said "Weather targets," but the chances of a weather target"s making a 180-degree turn just as an airplane turns into it, giving a radar lock-on, then changing speed to stay just out of range of the airplane"s radar, and then slowing down when the airplane leaves is as close to nil as you can get.

What was it? A lot of people I knew were absolutely convinced this report was the key--the final proof. Even if all of the thousands of other UFO reports could be discarded on a technicality, this one couldn"t be. These people believed that this report in itself was proof enough to officially accept the fact that UFO"s were interplanetary s.p.a.ceships. And when some people refused to believe even this report, the frustration was actually pitiful to see.

As the end of July approached, there was a group of officers in intelligence fighting hard to get the UFO "recognized." At ATIC, Project Blue Book was still trying to be impartial--but sometimes it was difficult.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hoax or Horror?

To the military and the public who weren"t intimately a.s.sociated with the higher levels of Air Force Intelligence during the summer of 1952--and few were--General Samford"s press conference seemed to indicate the peak in official interest in flying saucers. It did take the pressure off Project Blue Book--reports dropped from fifty per day to ten a day inside of a week--but behind the scenes the press conference was only the signal for an all-out drive to find out more about the UFO. Work on the special cameras continued on a high- priority basis, and General Samford directed us to enlist the aid of top-ranking scientists.

During the past four months we had collected some 750 comparatively well-doc.u.mented reports, and we hoped that something in these reports might give us a good lead on the UFO. My orders were to tell the scientists to whom we talked that the Air Force was officially still very much interested in the UFO and that their a.s.sistance, even if it was only in giving us ideas and comments on the reports, was badly needed. Although the statement of the problem was worded much more loosely, in essence it was, "Do the UFO reports we have collected indicate that the earth is being visited by a people from another planet?"

Such questions had been asked of the scientists before, but not in such a serious vein.

Then a secondary program was to be started, one of "educating" the military. The old idea that UFO reports would die out when the thrill wore off had long been discarded. We all knew that UFO reports would continue to come in and that in order to properly evaluate them we had to have every shred of evidence. The Big Flap had shown us that our chances of getting a definite answer on a sighting was directly proportional to the quality of the information we received from the intelligence officers in the field.

But soon after the press conference we began to get wires from intelligence officers saying they had interpreted the newspaper accounts of General Samford"s press conference to mean that we were no longer interested in UFO reports. A few other intelligence officers had evidently also misinterpreted the general"s remarks because their reports of excellent sightings were sloppy and incomplete. All of this was bad, so to forestall any misconceived ideas about the future of the Air Force"s UFO project, summaries of General Samford"s press conference were distributed to intelligence officers. General Samford had outlined the future of the UFO project when he"d said:

"So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with the best of our ability, giving it the attention that we feel it very definitely warrants. We will give it adequate attention, but not frantic attention."

The summary of the press conference straightened things out to some extent and our flow of reports got back to normal.

I was anxious to start enlisting the aid of scientists, as General Samford had directed, but before this could be done we had a backlog of UFO reports that had to be evaluated. During July we had been swamped and had picked off only the best ones. Some of the reports we were working on during August had simple answers, but many were unknowns. There was one report that was of special interest because it was an excellent example of how a UFO report can at first appear to be absolutely unsoluble then suddenly fall apart under thorough investigation. It also points up the fact that our investigation and a.n.a.lysis were thorough and that when we finally stamped a report "Unknown" it was unknown. We weren"t infallible but we didn"t often let a clue slip by.

At exactly ten forty-five on the morning of August 1, 1952, an ADC radar near Bellefontaine, Ohio, picked up a high-speed unidentified target moving southwest, just north of Dayton. Two F-86"s from the 97th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Wright-Patterson were scrambled and in a few minutes they were climbing out toward where the radar showed the UFO to be. The radar didn"t have any height-finding equipment so all that the ground controller at the radar site could do was to get the two F-86"s over or under the target, and then they would have to find it visually.

When the two airplanes reached 30,000 feet, the ground controller called them and told them that they were almost on the target, which was still continuing its southwesterly course at about 525 miles an hour. In a few seconds the ground controller called back and told the lead pilot that the targets of his airplane and the UFO had blended on the radar-scope and that the pilot would have to make a visual search; this was as close in as radar could get him. Then the radar broke down and went off the air.

But at almost that exact second the lead pilot looked up and there in the clear blue sky several thousand feet above him was a silver- colored sphere. The lead pilot pointed it out to his wing man and both of them started to climb. They went to their maximum alt.i.tude but they couldn"t reach the UFO. After ten minutes of unsuccessful attempts to identify the huge silver sphere or disk--because at times it looked like a disk--one of the pilots hauled the nose of his F-86 up in a stall and exposed several feet of gun camera film. Just as he did this the warning light on his radar gun sight blinked on, indicating that something solid was in front of him--he wasn"t photographing a sundog, hallucination, or refracted light.

The two pilots broke off the intercept and started back to Wright- Patterson when they suddenly realized that they were still northwest of the base, in almost the same location they had been when they started the intercept ten minutes before. The UFO had evidently slowed down from the speed that the radar had measured, 525 miles an hour, until it was hovering almost completely motionless.

As soon as the pilots were on the ground, the magazine of film from the gun camera was rushed to the photo lab and developed. The photos showed only a round, indistinct blob--no details--but they were proof that some type of unidentified flying object had been in the air north of Dayton.

Lieutenant Andy Flues was a.s.signed to this one. He checked the locations of balloons and found out that a 20-foot-diameter radiosonde weather balloon from Wright-Patterson had been very near the area when the unsuccessful intercept took place, but the balloon wasn"t traveling 525 miles an hour and it couldn"t be picked up by the ground radar, so he investigated further. The UFO couldn"t have been another airplane because airplanes don"t hover in one spot and it was no atmospheric phenomenon. Andy wrote it off as an unknown but it still bothered him; that balloon in the area was mighty suspicious. He talked to the two pilots a half dozen times and spent a day at the radar site at Bellefontaine before he reversed his "Unknown" decision and came up with the answer.

The unidentified target that the radar had tracked across Ohio was a low-flying jet. The jet was unidentified because there was a mix-up and the radar station didn"t get its flight plan. Andy checked and found that a jet out of Cleveland had landed at Memphis at about eleven-forty. At ten forty-five this jet would have been north of Dayton on a southwesterly heading. When the ground controller blended the targets of the two F-86"s into the unidentified target, they were at 30,000 feet and were looking for the target at their alt.i.tude or higher so they missed the low-flying jet--but they did see the balloon. Since the radar went out just as the pilots saw the balloon, the ground controller couldn"t see that the unidentified target he"d been watching was continuing on to the southwest. The pilots didn"t bother to look around any more once they"d spotted the balloon because they thought they had the target in sight.

The only part of the sighting that still wasn"t explained was the radar pickup on the F-86"s gun sight. Lieutenant Flues checked around, did a little experimenting, and found out that the small transmitter box on a radiosonde balloon will give an indication on the radar used in F-86 gun sights.

To get a final bit of proof, Lieutenant Flues took the gun camera photos to the photo lab. The two F-86"s had been at about 40,000 feet when the photos were taken and the 20-foot balloon was at about 70,000 feet. Andy"s question to the photo lab was, "How big should a 20-foot balloon appear on a frame of 16-mm. movie film when the balloon is 30,000 feet away?"