Part 8 (2/2)

He weighed the question for a few seconds--then he said that all he cared to say was that he didn't think that they were a natural phenoht that maybe someday one would hit the earth and the mystery would be solved He hoped that they were a natural phenomenon

After my talk with Dr La Paz I can well understand his apparent calht of September 18, 1954, when the newspaper reporter called hireen fireball report He was speaking from experience, not indifference, when he said, ”But I don't expect to find anything”

If the green fireballs are back, I hope that Dr La Paz gets an answer this tioes back to late January 1949, the tireen fireball mystery In another part of the country another odd series of events was taking place The center of activity was a highly secret area that can't be named, and the recipient of the UFO's, which were forhts, was the US Army

The series of incidents started when an to report seeing forht sky At first the lights were reported every three or four nights, but inside of teeks the frequency had stepped up Before long they were a nightly occurrence Some patrols reported that they had seen three or four fors weren't restricted to theretreat, the entire garrison watched a forround

As usual with UFO reports, the descriptions of the lights varied but the hts

As the fored in color froe and back to bluish white This color cycle took about two seconds The lights usually traveled from west to east and made no sound They didn't streak across the sky like a hts were ”a little bigger than the biggest star” Once in a while the GI's would get binoculars on thehts just looked bigger

Frohts were being sent to the Air Force through Ar to ATIC, but the green fireball activity was taking top billing and no cohts According to an Aron, this silence was taken toin reports, was necessary on the part of the Ars and no apparent action by the Air Force, the commander of the installation decided to take the initiative and set a trap His staff worked out a plan in record time Special UFO patrols would be sent out into the security area and they would be furnished with sighting equipment This could be the equipment that they normally used for fire control Each patrol would be sent to a specific location and would set up a co out of the command post, at points where the sky could be observed, would be sighting tea equiple of the UFO Four men were to be on each team, an instrument man, a timer, a recorder, and a radio operator All the UFO patrols would be assigned special radio frequencies

The operating procedure would be that when one sighting team spotted a UFO the radio operator would call out his team's location, the location of the UFO in the sky, and the direction it was going All of the other teams froin to sight on it While the radio , the instruin to call out the angles of elevation and azimuth The timer would call out the time; the recorder would write all of this down The co the report of the UFO, would call the next patrol and tell them They too would try to pick it up

Here was an excellent opportunity to get so that should have been done from the start Speeds, altitudes, and sizes that are esti at a UFO are miserably inaccurate But if you could accurately establish that so 30,000 h our atest story since the Creation

The plan seemed foolproof and had the full support of every man as to participate For the first tiet on the patrols The plan was quickly written up as a field order, approved, and raphed Since the Air Force had the priation, it was decided that the plan should be quickly co-ordinated with the Air Force, so a copy was rushed to thehtly reportswas ready to roll the minute the Air Force said ”Go”

The Air Force didn't OK the plan I don't knohere the plan was killed, or who killed it, but it was killed Its death caused two reactions

Many people thought that the plan was killed so that too many people wouldn't find out the truth about UFO's Others thought somebody was just plain stupid Neither was true The ansas simply that the official attitude toward UFO's had drastically changed in the past few months They didn't exist, they couldn't exist It was the belief at ATIC that the one last reen fireballs, had been solved a few days before at Los Alamos The fireballs were meteors and Project Twinkle would prove it Any further investigation by the Army would be a waste of tie in official attitude is as difficult to explain as it was difficult for n to believe I use the words ”official attitude” because at this time UFO's had becoh intelligence circles people had chosen sides and the two UFO factions that exist today were born

On one side was the faction that still believed in flying saucers

These people, coinal ideas Soht that the UFO's were interplanetary spaceshi+ps Others weren't quite as bold and just believed that a good deal more should be known about the UFO's before they were so completely written off These people weren't a bunch of nuts or crackpots either They ranged down through the ranks frorade civilians On the outside their vieere backed up by civilian scientists

On the other side were those who didn't believe in flying saucers

At one time many of the in back in 1947 and 1948, they were just as sure that the UFO's were real as the people they were now scoffing at But they had changed their ed their minds because they had seriously studied the UFO reports and just couldn't see any evidence that the UFO's were real But on pulling out in front and just ju policy of the UFO project was so pronounced that I, like so many other people, wondered if there was a hidden reason for the change Was it actually an atteround--to make the project more secretive? Was it an effort to cover up the fact that UFO's were proven to be interplanetary and that this should be withheld from the public at all cost to prevent a mass panic? The UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous ”The War of the Worlds” broadcast

This period of ” that there was nothing to this UFO business right at a ti better Fro to be done it should have been the other way, skeptics should have been changing to believers

Maybe I was just playing the frontcover-up I didn't like it because if somebody up above me knew that UFO's were really spacecraft, I couldfool out of hly I spent a lot of tie

The anti-saucer faction was born because of an old psychological trait, people don't like to be losers To be a loser makes one feel inferior and incompetent On September 23, 1947, when the chief of ATIC sent a letter to the Co that UFO's were real, intelligence committed themselves They had to prove it They tried for a year and a half with no success

Officers on top began to get anxious and the press began to get anxious They wanted an answer Intelligence had tried one answer, the then Top Secret Estimate of the Situation that ”proved” that UFO's were real, but it was kicked back The people on the UFO project began to think maybe the brass didn't consider them too sharp so they tried a new hypothesis: UFO's don't exist In no tinition Before if an especially interesting UFO report caet was an ”It could be real but we can't prove it” Now such a request got a quick, snappy ”It was a balloon,” and feathers were stuck in caps froon Everybody felt fine

In early 1949 the term ”new look” ell known The new look in women's fashi+ons was the lower heer lines In UFO circles the new look was cuss 'eed on February 11, 1949, when an order ritten that changed the nae The order was supposedly written because the classified nan, had been compromised This was always e I'd go further and say that the nanificance This wasn't true, they did have significance, a lot of it