The Flying Saucers are Real | Page 9

story broke, the Air Force admitted it was checking on the mystery disks. On July 4 the Air Force stated that no further investigation was needed; it was all
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hallucination. 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 Kieuper.
"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 northwest 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