“It looks as if people have come a long way since that Orson Welles scare,” I said to Purdy.
“But there isn’t any menace in this story,” he objected. “The crews were reported dead, so everybody got the idea that spacemen couldn’t live if they landed. What if a space ship should suddenly come down over a big city—say New York—low enough for millions of people to see it?”
“it might cause a stampede,” I said,
Purdy snorted. “it would be a miracle if it didn’t, unless people had been fully prepared. if we do a straight fact piece, just giving the evidence, it will start the ball rolling. People at least will be thinking about it.”
Before I left for Washington, I told Purdy of my last visit to the Pentagon. I had informed Air Force press relations officials of True’s intention to publish the space-travel answer. There had been no attempt to dissuade me. And I had been told once again that there was no security involved; that Project “Saucer” had found nothing threatening the safety of America.
At this time I had also asked if Project “Saucer” files were now available. The Wright Field unit, I was told, still was a classified project, both its files and its photographs secret. This had been the first week in October.
When I asked if there was any other information on published cases, the answer again was negative. The April 27th report, according to Press Branch officials, was still an accurate statement of Air Force opinions and policies. So far as they knew, no other explanations had be n found for the unidentified saucers.
‘I in absolutely convinced now,” I told Purdy, “that here’s an official policy to let the thing leak out. It explains why Forrestal announced our Earth Satellite Vehicle program, years before we could even start to build it. It also would explain those Project ‘Saucer’ hints in the April report.”
“I think we’re being used as a trial balloon,” Purdy said thoughtfully. “We’ve let them know what we’re doing. If they’d wanted to stop us, the Air Force could easily have done it. All they’d have to do would be call us in, give us the dope off the record, and tell us it was a patriotic duty to keep still. Just the way they did about uranium and atomic experiments during the war.”
He still did not have the name of the other magazine supposed to be working on the saucers. But it seemed a reliable tip (it later proved to be true), and from then on we worked under high pressure.