This shot the balloon theory right in the head. After the 360-degree turn the UFO seemed to be gradually losing alt.i.tude because it was getting below the level of the wings. The pilot decided to get a better look. He asked for full power on all four engines, climbed several thousand feet, and again turned into the UFO. He put the C-54 in a long glide, headed directly toward it. As they closed in, the UFO seemed to lose alt.i.tude a little faster and "sank" into the top of the overcast. Just as the C-54 flashed across the spot where the UFO had disappeared, the crew saw it rise up out of the overcast off their right wing and begin to climb so fast that in several seconds it was out of sight.

Both the pilot and copilot wanted to stay around and look for it but No. 2 engine had started to act up soon after they had put on full power for the climb, and they decided that they"d better get into Kansas City.

I missed my Dayton flight but I heard a good UFO story.

What had the two pilots and their pa.s.senger seen? We kicked it around plenty that afternoon. It was no balloon. It wasn"t another airplane because when the pilot called Kirksville Radio he"d asked if there were any airplanes in the area. It might possibly have been a reflection of some kind except that when it "sank" into the overcast the pilot said it looked like something sinking into an overcast--it just didn"t disappear as a reflection would. Then there was the sudden reappearance off the right wing. These are the types of things you just can"t explain.

What did the pilots think it was? Three were sold that the UFO"s were interplanetary s.p.a.cecraft, one man was convinced that they were some U.S. "secret weapon," and three of the men just shook their heads. So did I. We all agreed on one thing--this pilot had seen something and it was something highly unusual.

The meeting broke up about 9:00P.M. I"d gotten the personal and very candid opinion of seven airline captains, and the opinions of half a hundred more airline pilots had been quoted. I"d learned that the UFO"s are discussed often. I"d learned that many airline pilots take UFO sightings very seriously. I learned that some believe they are interplanetary, some think they"re a U.S. weapon, and many just don"t know. But very few are laughing off the good sightings.

By May 1950 the flying saucer business had hit a new all-time peak.

The Air Force didn"t take any side, they just shrugged. There was no attempt to investigate and explain the various sightings. Maybe this was because someone was afraid the answer would be "Unknown." Or maybe it was because a few key officers thought that the eagles or stars on their shoulders made them leaders of all men. If they didn"t believe in flying saucers and said so, it would be like calming the stormy Sea of Galilee. "It"s all a bunch of d.a.m.ned nonsense," an Air Force colonel who was controlling the UFO investigation said.

"There"s no such thing as a flying saucer." He went on to say that all people who saw flying saucers were jokers, crackpots, or publicity hounds. Then he gave the airline pilots who"d been reporting UFO"s a reprieve. "They were just fatigued," he said. "What they thought were s.p.a.ceships were windshield reflections."

This was the unbiased processing of UFO reports through normal intelligence channels.

But the U.S. public evidently had more faith in the "crackpot"

scientists who were spending millions of the public"s dollars at the White Sands Proving Grounds, in the "publicity-mad" military pilots, and the "tired, old" airline pilots, because in a nationwide poll it was found that only 6 per cent of the country"s 150,697,361 people agreed with the colonel and said, "There aren"t such things."

Ninety-four per cent had different ideas.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Pentagon Rumbles

On June 25, 1950, the North Korean armies swept down across the 38th parallel and the Korean War was on--the UFO was no longer a news item. But the lady, or gentleman, who first said, "Out of sight is out of mind," had never reckoned with the UFO.

On September 8, 1950, the UFO"s were back in the news. On that day it was revealed, via a book ent.i.tled _Behind_ _the_ _Flying_ _Saucers_, that government scientists had recovered and a.n.a.lyzed three different models of flying saucers. And they were fantastic-- just like the book. They were made of an unknown super-duper metal and they were manned by little blue uniformed men who ate concentrated food and drank heavy water. The author of the book, Frank Scully, had gotten the story directly from a millionaire oilman, Silas Newton. Newton had in turn heard the story from an employee of his, a mysterious "Dr. Gee," one of the government scientists who had helped a.n.a.lyze the crashed saucers.

The story made news, Newton and "Dr. Gee" made fame, and Scully made money.

A little over two years later Newton and the man who was reportedly the mysterious "Dr. Gee" again made the news. The Denver district attorney"s office had looked into the pair"s oil business and found that the pockets they were trying to tap didn"t contain oil.

According to the December 6, 1952, issue of the _Sat.u.r.day_ _Review_, the D.A. had charged the two men with a $50,000 con game. One of their $800,000 electronic devices for their oil explorations turned out to be a $4.00 piece of war surplus junk.

Another book came out in the fall of 1950 when Donald Keyhoe expanded his original UFO story that had first appeared in the January 1950 issue of _True_ magazine. Next to Scully"s book Keyhoe"s book was tame, but it convinced more people. Keyhoe had based his conjecture on fact, and his facts were correct, even if the conjecture wasn"t.

Neither the seesaw advances and retreats of the United Nations troops in Korea nor the two flying saucer books seemed to have any effect on the number of UFO reports logged into ATIC, however. By official count, seventy-seven came in the first half of 1950 and seventy-five during the latter half. The actual count could have been more because in 1950, UFO reports were about as popular as sand in spinach, and I would guess that at least a few wound up in the "circular file."

In early January 1951 I was recalled to active duty and a.s.signed to Air Technical Intelligence Center as an intelligence officer. I had been at ATIC only eight and a half hours when I first heard the words "flying saucer" officially used. I had never paid a great deal of attention to flying saucer reports but I had read a few--especially those that had been made by pilots. I"d managed to collect some 2,000 hours of flying time and had seen many odd things in the air, but I"d always been able to figure out what they were in a few seconds. I was convinced that if a pilot, or any crew member of an airplane, said that he"d seen something that he couldn"t identify he meant it--it wasn"t a hallucination. But I wasn"t convinced that flying saucers were s.p.a.ceships.

My interest in UFO"s picked up in a hurry when I learned that ATIC was the government agency that was responsible for the UFO project.

And I was really impressed when I found out that the person who sat three desks down and one over from mine was in charge of the whole UFO show. So when I came to work on my second morning at ATIC and heard the words "flying saucer report" being talked about and saw a group of people standing around the chief of the UFO project"s desk I about sprung an eardrum listening to what they had to say. It seemed to be a big deal--except that most of them were laughing. It must be a report of hoax or hallucination, I remember thinking to myself, but I listened as one of the group told the others about the report.

The night before a Mid-Continent Airlines DC-3 was taxiing out to take off from the airport at Sioux City, Iowa, when the airport control tower operators noticed a bright bluish-white light in the west. The tower operators, thinking that it was another airplane, called the pilot of the DC-3 and told him to be careful since there was another airplane approaching the field. As the DC-3 lined up to take off, both the pilots of the airliner and the tower operators saw the light moving in, but since it was still some distance away the DC- 3 was given permission to take off. As it rolled down the runway getting up speed, both the pilot and the copilot were busy, so they didn"t see the light approaching. But the tower operators did, and as soon as the DC-3 was airborne, they called and told the pilot to be careful. The copilot said that he saw the light and was watching it.

Just then the tower got a call from another airplane that was requesting landing instructions and the operators looked away from the light.

In the DC-3 the pilot and copilot had also looked away from the light for a few seconds. When they looked back, the bluish-white light had apparently closed in because it was much brighter and it was dead ahead. In a split second it closed in and flashed by their right wing--so close that both pilots thought that they would collide with it. When it pa.s.sed the DC-3, the pilots saw more than a light-- they saw a huge object that looked like the "fuselage of a B-29."

When the copilot had recovered he looked out his side window to see if he could see the UFO and there it was, flying formation with them.

He yelled at the pilot, who leaned over and looked just in time to see the UFO disappear.

The second look confirmed the Mid-Continent crew"s first impression-- the object looked like a B-29 without wings. They saw nothing more, only a big "shadowy shape" and the bluish-white light--no windows, no exhaust.

The tower had missed the incident because they were landing the other airplane and the pilot and the copilot didn"t have time to call them and tell them about what was going on. All the tower operators could say was that seconds after the UFO had disappeared the light that they had seen was gone.

When the airliner landed in Omaha, the crew filed a report that was forwarded to the Air Force. But this wasn"t the only report that was filed; a full colonel from military intelligence had been a pa.s.senger on the DC-3. He"d seen the UFO too, and he was mighty impressed.

I thought that this was an interesting report and I wondered what the official reaction would be. The official reaction was a great big, deep belly laugh.

This puzzled me because I"d read that the Air Force was seriously investigating all UFO reports.

I continued to eavesdrop on the discussions about the report all day since the UFO expert was about to "investigate" the incident. He sent out a wire to Flight Service and found that there was a B-36 somewhere in the area of Sioux City at the time of the sighting, and from what I could gather he was trying to blame the sighting on the B- 36. When Washington called to get the results of the a.n.a.lysis of the sighting, they must have gotten the B-36 treatment because the case was closed.

I"d only been at ATIC two days and I certainly didn"t cla.s.s myself as an intelligence expert, but it didn"t take an expert to see that a B-36, even one piloted by an experienced idiot, could not do what the UFO had done--buzz a DC-3 that was in an airport traffic pattern.

I didn"t know it at the time but a similar event had occurred the year before. On the night of May 29, 1950, the crew of an American Airlines DC-6 had just taken off from Washington National Airport, and they were about seven miles west of Mount Vernon when the copilot suddenly looked out and yelled, "Watch it--watch it." The pilot and the engineer looked out to see a bluish-white light closing in on them from dead ahead. The pilot racked the DC-6 up in a tight right turn while the UFO pa.s.sed by on the left "from eleven to seven o"clock" and a little higher than the airliner. During this time the UFO pa.s.sed between the full moon and DC-6 and the crew could see the dark silhouette of a "wingless B-29." Its length was about half the diameter of the full moon, and it had a blue flame shooting out the tail end.

Seconds after the UFO had pa.s.sed by the DC-6, the copilot looked out and there it was again, apparently flying formation off their right wing. Then in a flash of blue flame it was gone--streaking out ahead of the airliner and making a left turn toward the coast.

The pilot of the DC-6, who made the report, had better than 15,000 hours" flying time.

I didn"t hear anything about UFO"s, or flying saucers, as they were then known, for several weeks but I kept them in mind and one day I asked one of the old hands at ATIC about them--specifically I wanted to know about the Sioux City Incident. Why had it been sloughed off so lightly? His answer was typical of the official policy at that time. "One of these days all of these crazy pilots will kill themselves, the crazy people on the ground will be locked up, and there won"t be any more flying saucer reports."

But after I knew the people at ATIC a little better, I found that being anti-saucer wasn"t a unanimous feeling. Some of the intelligence officers took the UFO reports seriously. One man, who had been on Project Sign since it was organized back in 1947, was convinced that the UFO"s were interplanetary s.p.a.ceships. He had questioned the people in the control tower at G.o.dman AFB when Captain Mantell was killed chasing the UFO, and he had spent hours talking to the crew of the DC-3 that was buzzed near Montgomery, Alabama, by a "cigar-shaped UFO that spouted blue flame." In essence, he knew UFO history from _A_ _to_ _Z_ because he had "been there."

I think that it was this controversial thinking that first aroused my interest in the subject of UFO"s and led me to try to sound out a few more people.

The one thing that stood out to me, being unindoctrinated in the ways of UFO lore, was the schizophrenic approach so many people at ATIC took. On the surface they sided with the belly-laughers on any saucer issue, but if you were alone with them and started to ridicule the subject, they defended it or at least took an active interest. I learned this one day after I"d been at ATIC about a month.

A belated UFO report had come in from Africa. One of my friends was reading it, so I asked him if I could take a look at it when he had finished. In a few minutes he handed it to me.

When I finished with the report I tossed it back on my friend"s desk, with some comment about the whole world"s being nuts. I got a reaction I didn"t expect; he wasn"t so sure the whole world was nuts-- maybe the nuts were at ATIC. "What"s the deal?" I asked him. "Have they really thoroughly checked out every report and found that there"s nothing to any of them?"

He told me that he didn"t think so, he"d been at ATIC a long time.

He hadn"t ever worked on the UFO project, but he had seen many of their reports and knew what they were doing. He just plain didn"t buy a lot of their explanations. "And I"m not the only one who thinks this," he added.

"Then why all of the big show of power against the UFO reports?" I remember asking him.

"The powers-that-be are anti-flying saucer," he answered about half bitterly, "and to stay in favor it behooves one to follow suit."

As of February 1951 this was the UFO project.

The words "flying saucer" didn"t come up again for a month or two.

I"d forgotten all about the two words and was deeply engrossed in making an a.n.a.lysis of the performance of the Mig-15. The Mig had just begun to show up in Korea, and finding out more about it was a hot project.