The Flying Saucers are Real | Page 9

named Fred Johnson, who was
working up in the Cascade Mountains, spotted five or six disks banking
in the sun. He watched them through his telescope several seconds.
then he suddenly noticed that the compass hand on his special watch
was weaving wildly from side to side. Johnson insisted he had not
heard of the Arnold report, which was not broadcast until early
evening.
Kenneth Arnold's story was generally received with amusement. Most
Americans were unaware that the Pentagon had been receiving disk
reports as early as January. The news and radio comments on Arnold's
report brought several other incidents to light, which observers had
kept to themselves for fear of ridicule.
At Oklahoma City, a private pilot told Air Force investigators he had
seen a huge round object in the sky during the latter part of May. It was
flying three times faster than a jet, he said, and without any sound.
Citizens of Weiser, Idaho, described two strange fast-moving objects
they had seen on June 12. The saucers were heading southeast, now and
then dropping to a lower altitude, then swiftly climbing again. Several

mysterious objects were reported flying at great speed near Spokane,
just three days before Arnold's experience. And four days after his
encounter, an Air Force pilot flying near Lake Meade, Nevada, was
startled to see half a dozen saucers flash by his plane.
Even at this early point in the scare, official reports were contradicting
each other. just after Arnold's 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