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 Amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ton 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 alt.i.tude 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, a.s.suming 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 a.s.sure 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 circ.u.mstantial evidence that we presented to the panel of scientists in early 1953. There have been no reports in which the speed or alt.i.tude 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce flight societies of all the countries involved had strong feelings on the subject of saucers. Their att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociate of the Inst.i.tute 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 cla.s.s 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s faster. Twice before the riddle of the UFO has been "solved," only to have the reports increase in both quant.i.ty 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 s.p.a.ceships.

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ses that one of the many teams of its nation wide investigation net is not in the field investigating a new UFO report.