Part 12 (1/2)
This shot the balloon theory right in the head After the 360-degree turn the UFO see below the level of the wings The pilot decided to get a better look He asked for full power on all four engines, cliain 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 altitude 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 cre it rise up out of the overcast off their right wing and begin to cliht
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 cliet into Kansas City
I ood UFO story
What had the two pilots and their passenger 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 ht possibly have been a reflection of some kind except that when it ”sank” into the overcast the pilot said it looked like so 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 spacecraft, one man was convinced that they were some US ”secret weapon,” and three of the reed on one thing--this pilot had seen so broke up about 9:00PM 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 s very seriously I learned that some believe they are interplanetary, some think they're a US weapon, and ood 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 attes Maybe this was because someone was afraid the ansould be ”Unknown” Or les or stars on their shoulderssaucers and said so, it would be like cal the stormy Sea of Galilee ”It's all a bunch of da 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 spaceshi+ps indshi+eld reflections”
This was the unbiased processing of UFO reports through norence channels
But the US public evidently had more faith in the ”crackpot”
scientists ere spendingGrounds, 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 iteht 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 entitled _Behind_ _the_ _Flying_ _Saucers_, that government scientists had recovered and analyzed three differentsaucers 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 froovernment scientists who had helped analyze 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 ain 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 _Saturday_ _Review_, the DA had charged the two ame One of their 800,000 electronic devices for their oil explorations turned out to be a 400 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_ azine 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 seeed into ATIC, however By official count, seventy-seven ca 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 feound up in the ”circular file”
In early January 1951 I was recalled to active duty and assigned 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 ed to collect sos 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 crewthat he couldn't identify he meant it--it wasn't a hallucination But I wasn't convinced that flying saucers were spaceshi+ps
My interest in UFO's picked up in a hurry when I learned that ATIC was the governency 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 froe of the whole UFO show So when I ca 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 eardru deal--except thatItto roup told the others about the report