(In the final Project "Saucer" report, the attempt to explain away this sighting was painfully evident. Analyzing this case, Number 206, the Air Force said: "If the facts are correct, there is no astronomical explanation. A few points favor the daytime meteor hypothesis--snow-white color, speed faster than a jet, the roar, similarity to sky-writing and the time of day. But the tactics, if really performed, oppose it strenuously: the maneuvers in and out of cloud banks, turns of 180 degrees or more, Possibly these were illusions, caused by seeing the object intermittently through clouds. The impression of a fuselage with windows could even more easily have been a sign of imagination."

(With this conjecture, Project "Saucer" listed the sighting as officially answered. The Hague space-ship case was unexplained.)

In following up the Jackson and Bethel reports, I talked with two officials in the Civil Aeronautics Administration. One of these was Charley Planck, who handled public relations. I found that the pilots concerned had good records; C.A.A. men who knew them discounted the hoax theory.

"Charley, there's a rumor that airline pilots have been ordered not to talk," I told Planck. "You know anything about it?"

"You mean ordered by the Air Force or the companies?" he said.

"The Air Force and the C.A.A."

"If the C.A.A.'s in on it, it's a top-level deal," said Charley. "I think it's more likely the companies--with or without a nudge from the Air Force."

While we were talking, an official from another agency came in. Because the lead he gave me was off the record, I'll call him Steve Barrett. I knew Steve fairly well. We were both pilots with service training; our paths had crossed during the war, and I saw him now and then at airports around Washington.

When the saucer scare first broke, Steve had been disgusted. "Damn fools trying to get publicity," he snorted. "The way Americans fall for a gag! Even the Air Force has got the jitters."

So I was a little surprised to find he now thought the disks were real.

"What sold you?" I asked.

"The radar reports," said Steve. "I know of half a dozen cases where they've tracked the things. One was in Japan. The thing was climbing so fast no one believed the radarmen at first. Then they got some more reports. One was up in Canada. There was a case in New Mexico, and I think a Navy destroyer tracked a saucer up in the North Atlantic."

"What did they find out?" said Charley Planck.

Steve shrugged. "I don't know all the answers. Whatever they are, the things can go like hell."

I had a hunch he was holding back. I waited until he had finished with Charley, and then went, down the hall with him.

"You think the saucers are guided missiles?" I said. "If I thought so, I wouldn't be talking," he said flatly, "That's not a dig at you. But I was cleared last year for some secret electronics work, and it might be used in some way with guided missiles."

"I didn't know that, Steve."

"It's O.K.," he said. "I don't mind talking, because can't believe the saucers are guided missiles. Maybe few of the things sighted out in the Southwest have beer our test rockets, but that doesn't explain the radar reports in Canada and Japan."

"I'd already heard about a radar case in Labrador," I told Steve. He looked at me quickly.

"Where'd you pick that up;"

"True passed it on to me," I said.

"They've had some trouble tracking the things, they maneuver so fast," said Steve. "It sounds crazy, but I've been told they hit more than ten thousand miles an hour."

"You believe it.?"

"Well, it's not impossible. Those saucers were tracked about fifty miles up, where there's not much resistance."

The elevator door opened. Steve waited until we were outside of the Commerce Building.

"There's one other thing that gets me," he said. "Unless the radar boys are way off, some of those saucers are enormous. I just can't see a guided missile five hundred feet in diameter." He stopped for a moment. "I suppose this will sound screwy to you--"

"You think they're interplanetary," I said.

Steve was quickly on the defensive. "I haven't bought it yet, but it's not as crazy as it sounds."

Without mentioning names, I told him about the aircraft designer and the airline pilots.

"They're in good company," said Steve. "You know the Air Institute?"

"Sure--the Air Force school down at Montgomery."

"Six months ago, I was talking with an officer who'd been instructing there." Steve looked at me, deadly serious. "He told me they are now teaching that the saucers are probably space ships."

CHAPTER IX

THREE DAYS after my meeting with Steve Barrett, I was on a Mainliner 300, starting, a new phase of the saucer investigation. By the time I returned, I hoped to know the truth about Project "Saucer."

As the ship droned westward, fourteen thousand feet above the Alleghenies, I thought of what Steve had told me. I believed, that he had told me about the radar tracking. And I was fairly sure he believed the Air Institute story. But I wasn't so certain the story itself was true.

It would hardly be a gag; Steve wasn't easily taken in. It was more likely that one Institute officer, or perhaps several, believed the saucers were space craft and aired their personal opinions. The Institute wasn't likely to give an official answer to something that Project "Saucer" still declared unsolved.

If it were possible to get an inside look at Project "Saucer" operations, I could soon tell whether it was an actual investigation or a deliberate cover-up for something else. Whichever it was, the wall of official. secrecy still hid it.

As a formality, I had called the Pentagon again and asked to talk with some of the Project officers. As I expected, I was turned down. The only alternative was to dig out the story by talking with pilots and others who had been. quizzed by Project teams. I had several leads, and True had arranged some interviews for me.

My first stop was Chicago, where I met an airline official and two commercial pilots. I saw the pilots first. Since they both talked in confidence, I will not use their right names. One, a Midwesterner I already knew, I'll call Pete Farrell; the other, a wartime instructor, Art Green.

Pete was about thirty-one, stocky, blue-eyed, with a pleasant, intelligent face. Art Green was a little older, a lean, sunburned, restless man with an emphatic voice. Pete had served with the Air Force during the war; he

was now part owner of a flying school, also a pilot in the Air National Guard. Green was working for an air charter service

We met at the Palmer House. Art Green didn't need much prompting to talk about Project "Saucer." After reporting a disk, seen during a West Coast Right, he had been thoroughly grilled by a Project "Saucer" team.

"They practically took me apart," he said irritably. "They've got a lot of trick questions. Some of 'em are figured out to trip up anybody faking a story. The way they worked on me, you'd think I committed a murder.

"Then they tried to sell me on the idea I'd seen a balloon, or maybe a plane, with the sun shining on it when it banked. I told them to go to the devil--I knew what I saw. After seventeen years, I've got enough sense to tell a ship or a balloon when I see it."

"Did they believe you?" I asked him.

"If they did, they didn't let on. Two of 'em acted as if they thought I was nuts. The other guy-I think he was Air Force Intelligence--acted decent. He said not to get steamed up about the Aero-Medical boys; it was their job to screen out the crackpots.

"And on top of that, I found out later the F.B.I. had checked up on me to find out if I was a liar or a screwball. They went around to my boss, people in my neighborhood--even the pilots in my outfit. My outfit's still razzing me. I wouldn't report another saucer if one flew through my cockpit."

Pete Farrell hadn't encountered any Project "Saucer" teams personally, but he had some interesting angles. Some of the information had come from commercial and private pilots in the Midwest, part of it through National Guard contacts.

"I can tell you one thing," Pete said. "Guard pilots got the same order as the Air Force. If we saw anything peculiar flying around, we were to do our damnedest to identify it."

"What about trying to bring one down? I've heard that was in one order."

Pete hesitated for a second. "Look, I told you that much because it's been in the papers. But I'm still in the

Guard. I can't tell you the order itself. It was confidential."

"Well, I'm not in the Guard," said Art Green. He lit a cigarette, blew out the match. "Why don't you look into the Gorman case? Get thc dope on that court-martial angle."

I'd heard of the Gorman case, but the court-martial thing was new to me. Gorman, I recalled, was a fighter pilot in the North Dakota Air National Guard. He had a mystifying encounter with a strange, fast-moving "light" over Fargo Airport in the fall of 1948.

"That case is on my list," I told Green. "But I don't remember anything about a court-martial."

"It wasn't in the papers. But all the pilots up that way know about it. In his report, Gorman said something about trying to ram the thing. The idea got around that Air Force orders had said to try this. Anyway, it got into the papers and Gorman almost got court-martialed. If his family hadn't had some influence in the state, the Air Force probably would have pushed it."

"Are you sure about this?" I said. "You know how those things build up."

"Ask Gorman," he said. "Or ask some of the pilots at Fargo."

Before I left them, Green double-checked my report on his sighting, which Hilton had forwarded. As in the majority of cases, he had seen just one disk. It had hovered at a very high altitude, gleaming in the sun, then had suddenly accelerated and raced off to the north.

"I couldn't tell its size or speed," said Green. "But if it was as high as I think, it must have been pretty big."

Pete told me later that Green believed the disk had been at least twenty miles high, because it was well above clouds at thirty thousand feet.

"It's kind of hard to believe," said Pete. "The thing would have to be a lot bigger than a B-twenty-nine, and the speed over two thousand miles an hour."

"You know what they said about the Mantell saucer," I reminded him. "Some of the Godman Field people said it was at least three hundred feet in diameter."

"I've heard it was twice that," said Pete.

"You know any Kentucky National Guard pilots?" I asked.

"One or two," said Pete. "But they couldn't tell me anything. It was hushed up too fast."

That evening I talked with the airline official, whom I knew well enough to call by his first name. I put it to him bluntly.

"Dick, if you're under orders not to talk, just tell me. Fm trying to find out whether Project 'Saucer' has muzzled airline pilots."

"You mean the ones who've sighted things? Perhaps, in a few cases. But most of the pilots know what happened to Captain Emil Smith, on United, and those Eastern pilots. They keep still so they won't be laughed at. Also the airlines don't like their pilots to talk for publication."

"I've heard of several cases," I said, "where Air Force Intelligence is supposed to have warned pilots to keep mum. Two of the reports come pretty straight."

He made a gesture. "That could be. I'm not denying that airline pilots--and that includes ours--see these things all the time. They've been sighted on the Seattle-Alaska route, and between Anchorage and Japan. I know of several saucers that pilots have seen between Honolulu and the mainland. Check with Pan-American--you'll find their pilots have seen them, too."

"What happens to those reports?"

"They go to Operations," said Dick. "Of course, if something really important happens, the pilot may radio the tower before he lands. Then the C.A.A. gets word to the Air Force, and they rush some Intelligence officers to quiz the pilots. if it's not too hot, they'd come from Wright Field--regular Project 'Saucer' teams. Otherwise, they'd send the nearest Intelligence officers to take over temporarily."

I asked him if he had ever been in on one of thee sessions. Dick said he hadn't.

"But a couple of pilots talked to me later. They said these Air Force men seemed quite upset about it; they pounced on everything these boys said about the thing's appearance--how it maneuvered and so on."

"What do your pilots think the saucers are?"

Dick gave me a slightly ironic grin. "Why ask me? Captain Blake says you've been getting it firsthand."

"I wasn't pulling a fast one," I protested. "We're not going to quote actual names or sources, unless people. O.K. it."

"Sure, I know that," said Dick. "But you've got thc answer already. Some pilots say interplanetary, some say guided missiles. A few--a very few--still think it's all nonsense, because they haven't seen any."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know the answer," said Dick, "but I'm positive of one thing. Either the Air Force is sitting on a big secret, or they're badly scared because they don't know the answer."

During the next week or so, I covered several northwest and mountain states. Although I was chiefly trying to find out about Project "Saucer," I ran onto two sightings that were not on my list.

One of these had occurred in California, at Fairfield Suisan Air Force Base. A Seattle man who had been stationed there gave me the details. It was on the night of December 1918, with unusually high winds sweeping across the airfield. At times the gusts reached almost seventy miles an hour. Suddenly a weird ball of light flashed into view, at a height of a thousand feet. As the men on the base watched it, astonished, the mysterious light abruptly shot skyward. In an incredibly short time, it reached an altitude of twenty thousand feet and vanished.

"Was there any shape outlined behind the light?" I asked the Seattle man.

"Nobody saw any," he replied. "It looked just like I said--a ball of light, going like a streak."

"Did it leave any smoke behind it?"

"You mean like an engine, or a jet?" He shook his head. "Not a thing. And it didn't make a sound--even when it shot up like that."

"Did you hear any guesses about it, or reports later on?"

"Some major who didn't see it said it must have been

a balloon. Anybody with brains could see that was screwy. No balloon ever went up that fast--and besides, the thing was going against the wind."

The second incident occurred at Salmon Dam, Idaho, on August 13, 1947. When I heard the date, it sounded familiar. I checked my sightings file and saw it was the same day as the strange affair at Twin Falls, Idaho.

In the Twin Falls case, the disk was sighted by observers in a canyon. There was one interesting difference from the usual description. This disk was sky-blue, or else its gleaming surface somehow reflected the sky because of the angle of vision. Although it was not close to the treetops, the observers were amazed to see the trees whip violently when the disk raced overhead, as though the air was boiling from the object's swift passage.

At Salmon Dam, that same day, two miners heard an odd roaring sound and stared into the sky. Several miles away, two brightly gleaming disks were circling at high speed.

"It was like two round mirrors whirling around the sky," one of the men was later quoted as saying. "They couldn't have been any ordinary planes; not round like that. And they were going too fast."

During this part of my trip, I also was told that one saucer had fallen into a mountain lake. This came to me secondhand. The lone witness was said to have rushed over to his car to get his camera as the disk approached. When it plunged toward the lake, he was so startled that he failed to snap the picture until the moment it struck. This story sounded so flimsy that I didn't bother to list it.

Months later, a Washington newsman confirmed at least part of the lake story. When he first related it, I thought he had fallen for a gag.

"I heard that yarn," I said. "Don't tell me you believe it?"

"I come from Idaho," he told me. "And I happen to know the fellow who took the picture. Maybe it wasn't a disk, but something fell into that lake."

"Did you see the picture?"

"Yes, at the Pentagon." At my surprised look, he added,

"That was long before they clamped down.