The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects | Page 4

10,000 feet, called the other F-86, and
now was able to contact his buddy. They joined up and went back to
their base.
As soon as he had landed and parked, the F-86 pilot went into
operations to tell his story to his squadron commander. The mere fact
that he had fired his guns was enough to require a detailed report, as a
matter of routine. But the circumstances under which the guns actually
were fired created a major disturbance at the fighter base that day.
After the squadron commander had heard his pilot's story, he called the
group commander, the colonel, and the intelligence officer. They heard
the pilot's story.
For some obscure reason there was a "personality clash," the
intelligence officer's term, between the pilot and the squadron
commander. This was obvious, according to the report I was reading,

because the squadron commander immediately began to tear the story
apart and accuse the pilot of "cracking up," or of just "shooting his guns
for the hell of it and using the wild story as a cover-up."
Other pilots in the squadron, friends of the accused pilot-- including the
intelligence officer and a flight surgeon--were called in to "testify." All
of these men were aware of the fact that in certain instances a pilot can
"flip" for no good reason, but none of them said that he had noticed any
symptoms of mental crack-up in the unhappy pilot.
None, except the squadron commander. He kept pounding home his
idea-- that the pilot was "psycho"--and used a few examples of what the
report called "minor incidents" to justify his stand.
Finally the pilot who had been flying with the "accused" man was
called in. He said that he had been monitoring the tactical radio channel
but that he hadn't heard any calls from his buddy's low- flying F-86.
The squadron commander triumphantly jumped on this point, but the
accused pilot tended to refute it by admitting he was so jumpy that he
might not have been on the right channel. But when he was asked if he
had checked or changed channels after he had lost the object and before
he had finally contacted the other F-86, he couldn't remember.
So ended the pilot's story and his interrogation.
The intelligence officer wrote up his report of a UFO sighting, but at
the last minute, just before sending it, he was told to hold it back. He
was a little unhappy about this turn of events, so he went in to see why
the group commander had decided to delay sending the report to
Project Blue Book.
They talked over the possible reactions to the report. If it went out it
would cause a lot of excitement, maybe unnecessarily. Yet, if the pilot
actually had seen what he claimed, it was vitally important to get the
report in to ATIC immediately. The group commander said that he
would made his decision after a talk with his executive officer. They
decided not to send the report and ordered it destroyed.

When I finished reading, the intelligence officer's first comment was,
"What do you think?"
Since the evaluation of the report seemed to hinge upon conflicts
between personalities I didn't know, I could venture no opinion, except
that the incident made up the most fascinating UFO report I'd ever seen.
So I batted the intelligence officer's question back to him.
"I know the people involved," he replied, "and I don't think the pilot
was nuts. I can't give you the report, because Colonel ------ told me to
destroy it. But I did think you should know about it." Later he burned
the report.
The problems involved in this report are typical. There are certain
definite facts that can be gleaned from it; the pilot did see something
and he did shoot at something, but no matter how thoroughly you
investigate the incident that something can never be positively
identified. It might have been a hallucination or it might have been
some vehicle from outer space; no one will ever know. It was a UFO.
The UFO story started soon after June 24, 1947, when newspapers all
over the United States carried the first flying saucer report. The story
told how nine very bright, disk-shaped objects were seen by Kenneth
Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman, while he was flying his private
plane near Mount Rainier, in the state of Washington. With journalistic
license, reporters converted Arnold's description of the individual
motion of each of the objects--like "a saucer skipping across
water"--into "flying saucer," a name for the objects themselves. In the
eight years that have passed since Arnold's memorable sighting, the
term has become so common that it is now in Webster's Dictionary and
is known today in most languages in the world.
For a while