Part 10 (2/2)
After a quiet January, _True_ again clobbered the reading public
This time it was a story in the March 1950 issue and it was entitled, ”How Scientists Tracked Flying Saucers” It ritten by none other than the e of a teauidedGround, New Mexico He was Coraduate and a Regular Navy officer His story had been cleared by the ree, direct contradiction to every press release that had been made by the military in the past two years Not only did the commander believe that he had proved that UFO's were real but that he knehat they were ”I am convinced,” he wrote in the _True_ article, ”that it,” referring to a UFO he had seen at White Sands, ”was a flying saucer, and further, that these disks are spaceshi+ps fros”
On several occasions during 1948 and 1949, McLaughlin or his crew at the White Sands Proving Ground had s The best one was ineers, scientists, and technicians were getting ready to launch one of the huge 100-foot-diameter skyhook balloons It was 10:30AM
on an absolutely clear Sunday , the crew had sent up a small weather balloon to check the winds at lower levels One h a theodolite, an instrument similar to a surveyor's transit built around a 25-power telescope, onea stop watch, and a third had a clipboard to record the measured data The crew had tracked the balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly shouted and pointed off to the left The whole crew looked at the part of the sky where the , and there was a UFO ”It didn't appear to be large,” one of the scientists later said, ”but it was plainly visible It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape and had a 'whitish-silver color'” After taking a split second to realize what they were looking at, one of thethe theodolite around to pick up the object, and the timer reset his stop watch For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it moved toward the east In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped frorees, then it zooht The crew heard no sound and the New Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard ”a whisper a mile away”
When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second At one tiht, the UFO had passed in front of a range ofthis as a check point, they esti, and they computed that the UFO had been at an altitude of 296,000 feet, or _56_7made by White Sands scientists On April 5, 1948, another team watched a UFO for several minutes as it streaked across the afternoon sky in a series of violent maneuvers
The disk-shaped object was about a fifth the size of a full moon
On another occasion the crew of a C-47 that was tracking a skyhook balloon sao si in fro at just under 90,000 feet, and rapidly leave When the balloon was recovered it was ripped
I knew the two pilots of the C-47; both of the saucers And they aren't alone; so do the people of the Aeronautical Division of General Mills who launch and track the big skyhook balloons These scientists and engineers all have seen UFO's and they aren't their own balloons I was almost tossed out of the General Mills offices into a cold January Minneapolis snowstor--but that comes later in our history of the UFO
I don't knohat these people saw There has been a lot of interest generated by these sightings because of the extreh qualifications and caliber of the observers There is soitiures that McLaughlin's crew arrived at from the data they measured with their theodolite This doesn't mean much, however Even if they were off by a factor of 100 per cent, the speeds and altitudes would be fantastic, and besides they looked at the UFO through a 25-power telescope and swore that it was a flat, oval-shaped object Balloons, birds, and airplanes aren't flat and oval-shaped
Astrophysicist Dr Donald Menzel, in a book entitled _Flying_ _Saucers_, says they saw a refracted ie of their own balloon caused by an atht, but the General Mills people don't believe it And their disagreement is backed up by years of practical experience with the atmosphere, its tricks and its illusions
When the March issue of _True_ hlin's story about how the White Sands Scientists had tracked UFO's reached the public, it stirred up a hornets' nest Donald Keyhoe's article in the January _True_ had converted many people but there were still a few heathens The fact that govern it, took care of a large percentage of these heathens More andsaucers
The Navy had no cos, but they did cohlin It seeroup of scientists at White Sands, McLaughlin had carefully written up the details of the sightings and forwarded theton The report contained no personal opinions, just facts
The cohlin's report had been wired back to White Sands fro out there?” A very intelligent answer--and it carahlin was no longer at White Sands; he was at sea on the destroyer _Bristol_ Maybe he answered the admiral's wire
The Air Force had no coged and se, and continued to ”process UFO reports through regular intelligence channels”
In early 1950 the UFO's moved down to Mexico The newspapers were full of reports Tourists were bringing back enuine leather purses _Ti a fabulous business working the sky-gazing crowds that gathered when a _plativolo_ was seen Mexico's Departood reports but that the stories of finding crashed saucers weren't true
On March 8 one of the best UFO sightings of 1950 took place right over ATIC
Aboutin to land at the Dayton Municipal Airport As the pilot circled to get into the traffic pattern, he and his copilot saw a bright light hovering off to the southeast The pilot called the tower operators at the airport to tell the, the tower operators told hi at it too They had called the operations office of the Ohio Air National Guard, which was located at the airport, and while the tower operators were talking, an Air Guard pilot was running toward an F-51, dragging his parachute, helen mask
I knew the pilot, and he later told me, ”I wanted to find out once and for all what these screwy flying saucer reports were all about”
While the F-51 ar up, the tower operators called ATIC and told them about the UFO and where to look to see it The people at ATIC rushed out and there it was--an extreer than a star Whatever it was, it was high because every once in a while it would be blanked out by the thick, high, scattered clouds that were in the area While the group of people were standing in front of ATIC watching the light, soht Field to see if they had any radar ”on the air” The people in the lab said that they didn't have, but they could get operational in a hurry They said they would search southeast of the field with their radar and suggested that ATIC send some people over By the time the ATIC people arrived at the radar lab the radar was on the air and had a target in the sa at The radar was also picking up the Air Guard F-51 and an F-51 that had been scraht- Patterson The pilots of the Air Guard '51 and the Wright-Patterson '51 could both see the UFO, and they were going after it Thethe radar called the F-51's on the radio, got theet As the two airplanes climbed they kept up a continual conversation with the radar operator to
For several minutes they could clearly see the UFO, but when they reached about 15,000 feet, the clouds moved in and they lost it The pilots etting closer to the target, they decided to spread out to keep froh the clouds They went on instruments and in a few seconds they were in the cloud It was much worse than they'd expected; the cloud was thick, and the airplanes were icing up fast An F-51 is far froood instrument shi+p, but they stayed in their climb until radar called and said that they were close to the target; in fact, almost on it
The pilots had another hurried radio conference and decided that since the weather was so bad they'd better co, was in the clouds, they'd hit it before they could see it
So they made a wise decision; they dropped the noses of their airplanes and dove back down into the clear They circled awhile but the clouds didn't break In a few eant on the radar reported that the target was fading fast The F-51's went in and landed
When the target faded on the radar, some of the people went outside to visually look for the UFO, but it was obscured by clouds, and the clouds stayed for an hour When it finally did clear for a few one
A conference was held at ATIC that afternoon It included Roy James, ATIC's electronics specialist and expert on radar UFO's Roy had been over at the radar lab and had seen the UFO on the scope but neither the F-51 pilots nor the eant who operated the radar were at the conference The records show that at thisa unanimous decision was reached as to the identity of the UFO's The bright light was Venus since Venus was in the southeast duringon March 8, 1950, and the radar return was caused by the ice-laden cloud that the F-51 pilots had encountered Ice-laden clouds can cause a radar return The group of intelligence specialists at thedecided that this was further proved by the fact that as the F-51's approached the center of the cloud their radar return appeared to approach the UFO target on the radarscope They were near the UFO and near ice, so the UFO must have been ice