Chapter III
Just the idea of gigantic flying disks was incredible enough. It was almost as hard to believe that such missiles could have been developed without something leaking out Yet we had produced the A-bomb in comparative secrecy, and I knew we were working on long-range guided missiles. There was already a plan for a three-thousand-mile test range. Our supersonic planes had hit around two thousand miles an hour. Our two stage rockets had gone over two hundred miles high, according to reports. If an atomic engine had been secretly developed, it could explain the speed and range of the saucers.
But I kept coming back to Mantell’s death and the Air Force orders for pilots to chase the saucers. If the disks were American missiles, that didn’t jibe.
When I reached the lobby, I found it was ten after four. I caught a taxi and made the Congressional Limited with just one minute to spare. In the club car, I settled down to look at Purdy’s summary.
Skipping through the pages, I saw several familiar cases. Here and there, Purdy had scrawled brief comments or suggestions. Beside the Eastern Airline report of a double-decked saucer, he had written:
“Check rumor same type seen over Holland about this date. Also, similar Philippine Islands report-date unknown.”
I went back to the beginning. The first case listed was that of Kenneth Arnold, a Boise businessman, who had set off the saucer scare. Arnold was flying his private plane from Chehalis to Yakima; Washington, when he saw a bright flash on his wing.
Looking toward Mount Rainer, he saw nine gleaming disks outlined against the snow, each one about the size of a C-54.
“They flew close to the mountaintops, in a diagonal chainlike line,” he said later. “It was as if they were linked together.”
The disks appeared to be twenty to twenty-five miles
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away and moving at fantastic speed. Arnold’s estimate was twelve hundred miles an hour.
“I watched them about three minutes,” he said. They were swerving in and out around the high mountain peaks. They were flat, like a pie pan, and so shiny they reflected the sun like a mirror. I never saw anything so fast.”
The date was June 24, 1947.
On this same day there was another saucer report, which received very little notice. A Portland prospector named Fred Johnson, who was working up in the Cascade Mountains, spotted five or six disks banking in the sun He watched them through his telescope several seconds then he suddenly noticed that the compass hand on his special watch was weaving wildly from side to side. Johnson insisted he had not heard of the Arnold report, which was not broadcast until early evening.
Kenneth Arnold’s story was generally received with amusement. Most Americans were unaware that the Pentagon had been receiving disk reports as early as January. The news and radio comments on Arnold’s report brought several other incidents to light, which observers had kept to themselves for fear of ridicule.
At Oklahoma City, a private pilot told Air Force investigators he had seen a huge round object in the sky during the latter part of May. It was flying three times faster than a jet, he said, and without any sound. Citizens of Weiser, Idaho, described two strange fast-moving objects they had seen on June 12. The saucers were heading southeast, now and then dropping to a lower altitude, then swiftly climbing again. Several mysterious objects were reported flying at great speed near Spokane, just three days before Arnold’s experience. And four days after his encounter, an Air Force pilot flying near Lake Meade, Nevada, was startled to see half a dozen saucers flash by his plane.
Even at this early point in the scare, official reports were contradicting each other. Just after Arnold’s story broke, the Air Force admitted it was checking on the mystery discs. On July 4th the Air Force stated that no further investigation was needed; it was all hallucination.
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That same day, Wright Field told the Associated Press that the Air Materiel Command was trying to find the answer.
The Fourth of July was a red-letter day in the flying saucer mystery. At Portland, Oregon, hundreds of citizens, including former Air Force pilots, police, harbor pilots, and deputy sheriffs, saw dozens of gleaming disks flying at high speed. The things appeared to be at least forty thousand feet in the air – perhaps much higher.
That same day, disks were sighted at Seattle, Vancouver, and other northwest cities. The rapidly growing reports were met with mixed ridicule and alarm. One of the skeptical group was Captain E. J. Smith, of United Airlines.
“I’ll believe them when I see them,” he told airline employees, before taking off from Boise the afternoon of the Fourth.
Just about sunset, his airliner was flying over Emmett, Idaho, when Captain Smith and his copilot, Ralph Stevens, saw five queer objects in the sky ahead. Smith rang for the stewardess, Marty Morrow, and the three of them watched the saucers for several minutes. Then four more of the disks came into sight. Though it was impossible to tell their size, because their altitude was unknown, the crew was sure they were bigger than the plane they were in. After about ten minutes the disks disappeared.
The Air Force quickly denied having anything resembling the objects Captain Smith described.
“We have no experimental craft of that nature in Idaho—or anywhere else,” an official said in Washington. “We’re completely mystified.”
The Navy said it had made an investigation, and had no answers. There had been rumors that the disks were “souped up” versions of the Navy’s “Flying Flapjack,” a twin-engined circular craft known technically as the XF 5-U-1. But the Navy insisted that only one model had been built, and that it was now out of service.
In Chicago, two astronomers spiked guesses that the disks might be meteors. Dr. Girard Kieuper, director of the University of Chicago observatory, said flatly that they couldn’t be meteors.
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“They’re probably man-made,” he told the A.P. Dr. Oliver Lee, director of Northwestern’s observatory, agreed with Kuiper.
“The Army, Navy, and Air Force are working secretly on all sorts of things,” he said. “Remember the A bomb secrecy-and the radar signals to the moon.”
As I went through Purdy’s summary, I recalled my own reaction after the United Airlines report. After seeing the Pentagon comment, I had called up Captain Tom Brown, at Air Force Public Relations.
“Are you really taking this seriously?” I asked him.
“Well, we can’t just ignore it,” he said. “There are too many reliable pilots telling the same story – flat, round objects able to outmaneuver ordinary planes, and faster than anything we have. Too many stories tally.”
I told him I’d heard that the Civil Air Patrol in Wisconsin and other states was starting a sky search.
“We’ve got a jet at Muroc, and six fighters standing by at Portland right now,” Brown said.
“Armed?”
“I’ve no report on that. But I know some of them carry photographic equipment.”
Two days later an airline pilot from the Coast told me that some fighters had been armed and the pilots ordered to bring down the disks if humanly possible. That same day, Wright Field admitted it was checking stories of disk-shaped missiles seen recently in the Pacific north-west and in Texas.
Following this was an A.P. story, dated July 7, quoting an unnamed Air Force official in Washington:
“The flying saucers may be one of three things:
“1. Solar reflection on low-hanging clouds. [A Washington scientist, asked for comment, said this was hardly possible.]
“2. Small meteors which break up, their crystals catching the rays of the sun. But it would seem that they would have been spotted falling and fragments would have been found.
“3. Icing conditions could have formed large hailstones; and they might have flattened out and glided a bit, giving
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the impression of horizontal movement even though falling vertically.”
By this time everyone was getting into the act.
“The disks are caused by the transmutation of atomic energy.” said an anonymous scientist, supposed to be on the staff of California Tech. The college quickly denied it.
Dr. Vannevar Bush, world-famous scientist, and Dr. Merle Tuve, inventor of the proximity fuse, both declared they would know of any secret American missiles – and didn’t.
At Syracuse, New York, Dr. Harry Steckel, Veterans Administration psychiatrist, scoffed at the suggestion of mass hysteria.
“Too many sane people are seeing the things. The government is probably conducting some revolutionary experiments.”
On July 8 more disks were reported. Out at Muroc Air Force Base, where top-secret planes and devices are tested, six fast-moving silvery-white saucers were seen by pilots and ground officers.
That afternoon the Air Force revealed it was working on a case involving a Navy rocket expert named C. T. Zohm. While on a secret Navy mission to New Mexico, in connection with rocket tests, Zohm had seen a bright silvery disk flying above the desert. He was crossing the desert with three other scientists when he saw the strange object flashing northward at an altitude of about ten thousand feet.
“I’m sure it was not a meteor,” said Zohm. “It could have been a guided missile, but I never heard of anything like it.”
By this time, saucer reports had come in from almost forty states. Alarm was increasing, and there were demands that radar be used to track the disks. The Air Force replied that there was not enough radar equipment to blanket the nation, but that its pilots were on the look out for the saucers.
One report mentioned a curious report from Twin Falls Idaho. The disk sighted there was said to have flown so low that the treetops whirled as if in a violent storm. Someone had phoned Purdy about a disk tracked
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by weather-balloon observers at Richmond, Va. There was another note on a sighting at Hickam Field, Honolulu, and two reports of unidentified objects seen near Anchorage, Alaska.
A typed list of world-wide sightings had been made by the staff at True. It contained many cases that were new to me, reports from Paraguay, Belgium, Turkey; Holland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. At the bottom of this memo Purdy had written: “Keep checking on rumor that the Soviet has a Project Saucer; too. Could be planted.”
From the mass of reports, John DuBarry, the aviation editor of True, had methodically worked out an average picture of the disks: “The general report is that they are round or oval (this could be an elliptical object seen end-on), metallic looking, very bright — either shining white or silvery colored, They can move at extremely high speed, hover, accelerate rapidly, and outmaneuver ordinary aircraft.
“The lights are usually seen singly — very few formations reported. They seem to have the same speed, acceleration, and ability to maneuver. In several cases they have been able to evade Air Force planes in night encounters.”
Going over the cases, I realized that Purdy and his staff had dug up at least fifty reports that had not appeared in the papers. (A few of these proved incorrect, but a check with the Air Force case reports released on December 30, 1949, showed that True’s files contained all the important items.) These cases included sightings at eleven Air Force bases and fourteen American airports, reports from ships at sea, and a score of encounters by airline and private pilots.
Witnesses included Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force officers; state and city police; F.B.I. agents; weather observers, shipmasters, astronomers, and thousands of good solid American citizens, I learned later that many witnesses had been investigated by the F.B.I. to weed out crackpot reports.
I ended up badly puzzled. The evidence was more impressive than I had suspected. It was plain that many
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reports had been entirely suppressed, or at least kept out of the papers. There was something ominous about it. No matter what the answer, it was serious enough to be kept hidden.
If it were a Soviet missile, I thought, God help us. They’d scooped up a lot of Nazi scientists and war secrets. And the Germans had been far ahead of us on guided missiles. But why would they give us a two-year warning, testing the things openly over America? It didn’t make sense.
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