Colonel S. H. Kirkland and I once spent a whole day briefing and talking to the Beacon Hill Group, the code name for a collection of some of the world"s leading scientists and industrialists. This group, formed to consider and a.n.a.lyze the toughest of military problems, took a very serious interest in our project and gave much good advice. At Los Alamos and again at Sandia Base our briefings were given in auditoriums to standing room only crowds. In addition I gave my briefings at National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics laboratories, at Air Research and Development centers, at Office of Naval Research facilities and at the Air Force University. Then we briefed special groups of scientists.

Normally scientists are a cautious lot and stick close to proven facts, keeping their personal opinions confined to small groups of friends, but when they know that there is a sign on a door that says "Cla.s.sified Briefing in Progress," inhibitions collapse like the theories that explain all the UFO"s away. People say just what they think.

I could jazz up this part of the UFO story as so many other historians of the UFO have and say that Dr. So-and-So believes that the reported flying saucers are from outer s.p.a.ce or that Dr. Whositz is firmly convinced that Mars is inhabited. I talked to plenty of Dr.

So-and-So"s who believed that flying saucers were real and who were absolutely convinced that other planets or bodies in the universe were inhabited, but we were looking for proven facts and not just personal opinions.

However, some of the questions we asked the scientists had to be answered by personal opinions because the exact answers didn"t exist.

When such questions came up, about all we could do was to try to get the largest and most representative cross section of personal opinions upon which to base our decisions. In this category of questions probably the most frequently discussed was the possibility that other celestial bodies in the universe were populated with intelligent beings. The exact answer to this is that no one knows.

But the consensus was that it wouldn"t be at all surprising.

All the briefings we were giving added to our work load because UFO reports were still coming in in record amounts. The lack of newspaper publicity after the Washington sightings had had some effect because the number of reports dropped from nearly 500 in July to 175 in August, but this was still far above the normal average of twenty to thirty reports a month.

September 1952 started out with a rush, and for a while it looked as if UFO sightings were on the upswing again. For some reason, we never could determine why, we suddenly began to get reports from all over the southeastern United States. Every morning, for about a week or two, we"d have a half dozen or so new reports. Georgia and Alabama led the field. Many of the reports came from people in the vicinity of the then new super-hush-hush Atomic Energy Commission facility at Savannah River, Georgia. And many were coming from the port city of Mobile, Alabama. Our first thought, when the reports began to pour in, was that the newspapers in these areas were possibly stirring things up with scare stories, but our newspaper clipping service covered the majority of the southern papers, and although we kept looking for publicity, none showed up. In fact, the papers only barely mentioned one or two of the sightings. As they came in, each of the sighting reports went through our identification process; they were checked against all balloon flights, aircraft flights, celestial bodies, and the MO file, but more than half of them came out as unknowns.

When the reports first began to come in, I had called the intelligence officers at all of the major military installations in the Southeast unsuccessfully trying to find out if they could shed any light on the cause of the sightings. One man, the man who was responsible for UFO reports made to Brookley AFB, just outside of Mobile, Alabama, took a dim view of all of the proceedings. "They"re all nuts," he said.

About a week later his story changed. It seems that one night, about the fourth night in a row that UFO"s had been reported near Mobile, this man and several of his a.s.sistants decided to try to see these famous UFO"s; about 10:00P.M., the time that the UFO"s were usually reported, they were gathered around the telephone in the man"s office at Brookley AFB. Soon a report came in. The first question that the investigator who answered the phone asked was, "Can you still see it?"

The answer was "Yes," so the officer took off to see the UFO.

The same thing happened twice more, and two more officers left for different locations. The fourth time the phone rang the call was from the base radar station. They were picking up a UFO on radar, so the boss himself took off. He saw the UFO in air out over Mobile Bay and he saw the return of the UFO on the radarscope.

The next morning he called me at ATIC and for over an hour he told me what had happened. Never have I talked to four more ardent flying saucer believers.

We did quite a bit of work on the combination radar-visual sighting at Brookley. First of all, radar-visual sightings were the best type of UFO sightings we received. There are no explanations for how radar can pick up a UFO target that is being watched visually at the same time. Maybe I should have said there are no proven explanations on how this can happen, because, like everything else a.s.sociated with the UFO, there was a theory. During the Washington National Sightings several people proposed the idea that the same temperature-inversion layer that was causing the radar beam to bend down and pick up a ground target was causing the target to appear to be in the air. They went on to say that we couldn"t get a radar-visual sighting unless the ground target was a truck, car, house, or something else that was lighted and could be seen at a great distance. The second reason the Brookley AFB sighting was so interesting was that it knocked this theory cold.

The radar at Brookley AFB was so located that part of the area that it scanned was over Mobile Bay. It was in this area that the UFO was detected. We thought of the theory that the same inversion layer that bent the radar beam also caused the target to appear to be in the air, and we began to do a little checking. There was a slight inversion but, according to our calculations, it wasn"t enough to affect the radar. More important was the fact that in the area where the target appeared there were no targets to pick up--let alone lighted targets. We checked and rechecked and found that at the time of the sighting there were no ships, buoys, or anything else that would give a radar return in the area of Mobile Bay in which we were interested.

Although this sighting wasn"t as glamorous as some we had, it was highly significant because it was possible to show that the UFO couldn"t have been a lighted surface target.

While we were investigating the sighting we talked to several electronics specialists about our radar-visual sightings. One of the most frequent comments we heard was, "Why do all of these radar- visual sightings occur at night?"

The answer was simple: they don"t. On August 1, just before dawn, an ADC radar station outside of Yaak, Montana, on the extreme northern border of the United States, picked up a UFO. The report was very similar to the sighting at Brookley except it happened in the daylight and, instead of seeing a light, the crew at the radar station saw a "dark, cigar-shaped object" right where the radar had the UFO pinpointed.

What these people saw is a mystery to this day.

Late in September I made a trip out to Headquarters, ADC to brief General Chidlaw and his staff on the past few months" UFO activity.

Our plans for periodic briefings, which we had originally set up with ADC, had suffered a bit in the summer because we were all busy elsewhere. They were still giving us the fullest co-operation, but we hadn"t been keeping them as thoroughly read in as we would have liked to. I"d finished the briefing and was eating lunch at the officers"

club with Major Verne Sadowski, Project Blue Book"s liaison officer in ADC Intelligence, and several other officers. I had a hunch that something was bothering these people. Then finally Major Sadowski said, "Look, Rupe, are you giving us the straight story on these UFO"s?"

I thought he meant that I was trying to spice things up a little, so I said that since he had copies of most of our reports and had read them, he should know that I was giving them the facts straight across the board.

Then one of the other officers at the table cut in, "That"s just the point, we do have the reports and we have read them. None of us can understand why Intelligence is so hesitant to accept the fact that something we just don"t know about is flying around in our skies-- unless you are trying to cover up something big."

Everyone at the table put in his ideas. One radar man said that he"d looked over several dozen radar reports and that his conclusion was that the UFO"s couldn"t be anything but interplanetary s.p.a.ceships. He started to give his reasons when another radar man leaped into the conversation.

This man said that he"d read every radar report, too, and that there wasn"t one that couldn"t be explained as a weather phenomenon--even the radar-visual sightings. In fact, he wasn"t even convinced that we had ever gotten such a thing as radar-visual sighting. He wanted to see proof that an object that was seen visually was the same object that the radar had picked up. Did we have it?

I got back into the discussion at this point with the answer. No, we didn"t have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of proof needed. But we did have reports where the radar and visual bearings of the UFO coincided almost exactly. Then we had a few reports where airplanes had followed the UFO"s and the maneuvers of the UFO that the pilot reported were the same as the maneuvers of the UFO that was being tracked by radar.

A lieutenant colonel who had been sitting quietly by interjected a well-chosen comment. "It seems the difficulty that Project Blue Book faces is what to accept and what not to accept as proof."

The colonel had hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head.

Then he went on, "Everyone has a different idea of what proof really is. Some people think we should accept a new model of an airplane after only five or ten hours of flight testing. This is enough proof for them that the airplane will fly. But others wouldn"t be happy unless it was flight-tested for five or ten years. These people have set an unreasonably high value on the word "proof." The answer is somewhere in between these two extremes."

But where is this point when it comes to UFO"s?

There was about a thirty-second pause for thought after the colonel"s little speech. Then someone asked, "What about these recent sightings at Mainbrace?"

In late September 1952 the NATO naval forces had held maneuvers off the coast of Europe; they were called Operation Mainbrace. Before they had started someone in the Pentagon had half seriously mentioned that Naval Intelligence should keep an eye open for UFO"s, but no one really expected the UFO"s to show up. Nevertheless, once again the UFO"s were their old unpredictable selves--they were there.

On September 20, a U.S. newspaper reporter aboard an aircraft carrier in the North Sea was photographing a carrier take-off in color when he happened to look back down the flight deck and saw a group of pilots and flight deck crew watching something in the sky.

He went back to look and there was a silver sphere moving across the sky just behind the fleet of ships. The object appeared to be large, plenty large enough to show up in a photo, so the reporter shot several pictures. They were developed right away and turned out to be excellent. He had gotten the superstructure of the carrier in each one and, judging by the size of the object in each successive photo, one could see that it was moving rapidly.

The intelligence officers aboard the carrier studied the photos. The object looked like a balloon. From its size it was apparent that if it were a balloon, it would have been launched from one of the ships, so the word went out on the TBS radio: "Who launched a balloon?"

The answer came back on the TBS: "n.o.body."

Naval Intelligence double-checked, triple-checked and quadruple- checked every ship near the carrier but they could find no one who had launched the UFO.

We kept after the Navy. The pilots and the flight deck crew who saw the UFO had mixed feelings--some were sure that the UFO was a balloon while others were just as sure that it couldn"t have been. It was traveling too fast, and although it resembled a balloon in some ways it was far from being identical to the hundreds of balloons that the crew had seen the aerologists launch.

We probably wouldn"t have tried so hard to get a definite answer to the Mainbrace photos if it hadn"t been for the events that took place during the rest of the operation, I explained to the group of ADC officers.

The day after the photos had been taken six RAF pilots flying a formation of jet fighters over the North Sea saw something coming from the direction of the Mainbrace fleet. It was a shiny, spherical object, and they couldn"t recognize it as anything "friendly" so they took after it. But in a minute or two they lost it. When they neared their base, one of the pilots looked back and saw that the UFO was now following him. He turned but the UFO also turned, and again it outdistanced the Meteor in a matter of minutes.

Then on the third consecutive day a UFO showed up near the fleet, this time over Topcliffe Aerodrome in England. A pilot in a Meteor was scrambled and managed to get his jet fairly close to the UFO, close enough to see that the object was "round, silvery, and white"

and seemed to "rotate around its vertical axis and sort of wobble."

But before he could close in to get a really good look it was gone.

It was these sightings, I was told by an RAF exchange intelligence officer in the Pentagon, that caused the RAF to officially recognize the UFO.

By the time I"d finished telling about the Mainbrace Sightings, it was after the lunch hour in the club and we were getting some get-the- h.e.l.l-out-of-here looks from the waiters, who wanted to clean up the dining room. But before I could suggest that we leave, Major Sadowski repeated his original question--the one that started the whole discussion--"Are you holding out on us?"

I gave him an unqualified "No." We wanted more positive proof, and until we had it, UFO"s would remain unidentified flying objects and no more.

The horizontal shaking of heads ill.u.s.trated some of the group"s thinking.

We had plans for getting more positive proof, however, and I said that just as soon as we returned to Major Sadowski"s office I"d tell them what we contemplated doing.

We moved out onto the sidewalk in front of the club and, after discussing a few more sightings, went back into the security area to Sadowski"s office and I laid out our plans.

First of all, in November or December the U.S. was going to shoot the first H-bomb during Project Ivy. Although this was Top Secret at the time, it was about the most poorly kept secret in history-- everybody seemed to know all about it. Some people in the Pentagon had the idea that there were beings, earthly or otherwise, who might be interested in our activities in the Pacific, as they seemed to be in Operation Mainbrace. Consequently Project Blue Book had been directed to get transportation to the test area to set up a reporting net, brief people on how to report, and a.n.a.lyze their reports on the spot.

Secondly, Project Blue Book was working on plans for an extensive system to track UFO"s by instruments. Brigadier General Garland, who had been General Samford"s Deputy Director for Production and who had been riding herd on the UFO project for General Samford, was now chief at ATIC, having replaced Colonel Dunn, who went to the Air War College. General Garland had long been in favor of trying to get some concrete information, either positive or negative, about the UFO"s.

This planned tracking system would replace the defraction grid cameras that were still being developed at ATIC.