Part 13 (1/2)

Then the words ”flying saucer” drifted across the roohter there was a note of hysteria

It see so about doing a feature article The writer had gone to the Office of Public Inforon and had inquired about the current status of Project Grudge To accommodate the writer, the OPI had sent a wire out to ATIC: What is the status of Project Grudge?

Back went a snappy reply: Everything is under control; each new report is being thoroughly analyzed by our experts; our vast files of reports are in tiptop shape; and in general things are hunky-dunky

All UFO reports are hoaxes, hallucinations, and the misidentification of known objects

Another wire fro for Dayton He wants to check soazines had printed UFO stories, and other reporters had visited ATIC, but they had always stayed in the offices of the top brass For some reason the na that this Bob Ginna was going to ask questions caused sweat to flow at ATIC

Ginna arrived and the ATIC UFO ”expert” talked to hi list of questions about reports that had been made over the past four years and every ti out of the room to try to find the file that had the answer I re open bundles of files and pawing through theophers Many tiht spot

Ginna, I can assure you, was not at all i UFO project” People weren't buying the hoax, hallucination, and misidentification stories quite as readily as the Air Force believed

Where it started or who started it I don't know, but about two months after the visit froan to pick up Lieutenant Jerry cus, who had recently been recalled to active duty, took over the project

Lieutenant cuiven a job to do does it In a feeeks the operation of the UFO project had i under political, econoht across froet a UFO indoctrination via bull sessions

Whenever Jerry found a good report in the pile--and all he had to start as a pile of papers and files--he'd toss it over for me to read

Some of the reports were unimpressive, I remember But a feere just the opposite Two that I re htly The two reports involvedGround in New Mexico

The guided e at White Sands is fully instruuided missiles Located over an area of many square miles there are camera stations equipped with cinetheodolite caether by a telephone systeuided missile had been fired, and as it roared up into the stratosphere and fell back to earth, the caht All the crews had started to unload their ca across the sky

By April 1950 every person at White Sands was UFO-conscious, so one rabbed a telephone headset, alerted the other crews, and told theet pictures Unfortunately only one camera had film in it, the rest had already been unloaded, and before they could reload, the UFO was gone The photos froy dark object About all the fil was in the air and whatever it was, it was et a UFO to ”run a reed to keep a sharper lookout They also got the official OK to ”shoot” a UFO if one appeared

Almost exactly a month later another UFO did appear, or at least at the tiht that it was _a_ UFO This time the creere ready--when the call went out over the telephone net that a UFO had been spotted, all of the crews scanned the sky Two of the cre it and shot several feet of filht object streaked across the sky

As soon as the missile tests were co lab and then took it to the Data Reduction Group But once again the UFO had eluded man because there were apparently two or raphed a separate one The data were no good for triangulation

The records at ATIC didn't contain the analysis of these films but they did mention the Data Reduction Group at White Sands So when I later took over the UFO investigation I made several calls in an effort to run down the actual film and the analysis The files at White Sands, like all files, evidently weren't very good, because the original reports were gone I did contact a major as very co- operative and offered to try to find the people who had worked on the analysis of the fil to two men who had done the analysis, hat I'd expected--nothing concrete except that the UFO's were unknowns He did say that by putting a correction factor in the data gathered by the two cah estiher than 40,000 feet, traveling over 2,000 miles per hour, and it was over 300 feet in diaures were only estimates, based on the possibly erroneous correction factor; therefore they weren't proof of anything--except that so was in the air

The people at White Sands continued to be on the alert for UFO's while the camera stations were in operation because they realized that if the flight path of a UFO could be accurately plotted and timed it could be positively identified But no s came over to my desk and dropped a stack of reports in front ofmore and more of them every day”

Radar reports, I knew, had always been a controversial point in UFO history, and ifin, there was no doubt that an already controversial issue was going to be coree saucer is picked up on radar, it is necessary to know a little bit about how radar operates

Basically radar is nothing but a piece of electronic equipment that ”shouts” out a radio wave and ”listens” for the echo By ”knowing”

how fast the radio, or radar, wave travels and fro, the radar tells the direction and distance of the object that is causing the echo Any ”solid” object like an airplane, bird, shi+p, or even a moisture-laden cloud can cause a radar echo

When the echo comes back to the radar set, the radar operator doesn't have to listen for it and time it because this is all done for him by the radar set and he sees the ”answer” on his radarscope--a kind of a round TV screen What the radar operator sees is a bright dot, called a ”blip” or a ”return” The location of the return on the scope tells hi the echo As the object h the sky, the radar operator sees a series of bright dots on his scope that et, the object causing the echo, can also be measured