“I’m not sure about the senior officer,” General Smith answered. “He may have been detached already. But I don’t see any reason why you can’t see those files. I’ll phone Wright Field and call you.”
I was about to leave, but he motioned for me to sit down.
“I can understand how you feel about the Mantell report,” General Smith said earnestly. “I knew Tommy Mantell very well. And Colonel Hix is a classmate of mine. I knew neither one was the kind to have hallucinations. That case got me, at first.”
“You believe Venus is the true answer?” I asked him.
He seemed surprised. “It must be, if Wright Field says so.”
When I went back to the Press Branch, I asked Jack Shea for the case-report summaries that Boggs had mentioned, He got them for me—two collections of loose-leaf mimeographed sheets enclosed in black binders. So these were the “secret files”!
Across the hall, in the press room, I opened one book at random. The first thing I saw was this:
“A meteorologist should compute the approximate energy required to evaporate as much cloud as shown in the incident 26 photographs.”
Photographs. Major Boggs had said there were no important pictures. I tucked the binders under my arm and went out to my car. Perhaps these books hinted at more than Boggs had realized. But that didn’t seem likely. As liaison man, he should know all the answers. I was almost positive that he did.
But I was equally sure they weren’t the answers he had given me.