◆ SpookStack

Ag PORTER AT Lg midsummer of 1947, the ed tes Air Force, already concerned h such problems as.the develop- of guided missiles and supersonic he rigging up of radar networks, ontroversy with the Navy over jon, found itself confronted by ;and completely different, head- flying saucer. People in every - $eC of the country were seeing strange objects that streaked across the sky at tremendous speeds, and while these people,. who included such prac- ticed students of the heavens as air- plane pilots, farmers, and the Lieutenant Governor of Idaho, were -not able to identify the things they had seen, they were able to describe them vividly and unforgettably. The newspapers called the first of these mysterious objects a flying saucer, taking their cue from the man who reported having seen it and who described it as saucerlike, and the name stuck, although later people re- ported seein i hat looked like fly- ing pmii aps, flying dimes, gaslights, flying flying pie plates, rious things were autiously quizzical gan to appear in the papers, and the President and members of Con- gress received a deluge of letters de- manding an explanation, Many of the letter writers had concluded that the objects, whatever they might be, were manned by Russians, and that as soon as their pilots had reconnoitred suffi- ciently, they would return loaded with atomic bombs. Others thought the earth was being visited by space ships from another planet. Still others suspected that our own Air Force was secretly testing some new form of aircraft, Everyone agreed, however, that it was up to the Air Force, as the cus- todian of our welkin, to explain the flying objects and, if ne€cessary, to repel them. The result was the launching by the Air Force, on January 22, 1948, of a special Investigation, an investiga- tion that, though it has reached num- €rous conclusions, is stil] under way and has yet to put the public mind at rest, It appears that, aside from the hope of reassuring a jittery populace, the Air Force, in embarking upon this under- taking, had any or all of three things in mind. It may well have shared the civilian concern over what, if anything the Russians might have to do with the reported phenomena, and it may even have felt that to insure a thoroughgoing SOMETHING IN THE. SKY investigation there was certainly no harm in assuming for the moment that the era of interplanetary travel had arrived and the earth had become an objective for journeys from. else- where in the solar system. Or—and this would not necessarily exclude the first two considerations—the Air Force may have been setting up a smoke screen to protect, in the interest of national secu- rity, the secret of some experimental fly- ing objects of its own that only a trusted few of its members knew about. What- ever the purpose, the investigation, with which I have been in touch from time to time, has seemingly been exhaustive. The Air Force personnel originally assigned to it was later augmented by astronomers, psychologists, physicists, meteorologists, physicians, and repre- sentatives of the F.B.I. The investiga- tion, which soon became popularly known as Project Saucer, was first headed by Li 3 nj PGE eral of the Air Matériel Command, and its base was, and is, at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. The project’s task turned out to involve a mixture of old-fashioned detection, scientific analysis, public rela- tions, and the study of a widespread state of mind. In December, 1949, after checking, over a period of two years, three hundred and seventy-five reports of intruders in the sky, the Air Force publicly called it quits, but Project Saucer was not actually disbanded. Na- tional security, the Air Force announced at the time, was not endangered. The flying saucers were apparitions, it said, all attributable either to a failure to recognize conventional objects, to hoaxes, or to a mild form of mass hys- teria. The Air Force, however, did not let the matter rest there. Not long after the apparent demise of Project Saucer, I had a talk in Wash- ington with Brigadier General Ernest Moore, then chief of Air Force In- telligence, in the course of which he made four categorical statements that I felt sure he had made many times be- Clipved from The N&W YORKER September 6, 1952 pages 64 through 82