It was some time before this when I heard the first crazy rumor about the guided-missile display. This story, which had new details every time I heard it described the Air Force as refusing to let the Navy announce a new type of missile. According to the rumors, the Air Force was trying to prove its own missile far superior, to keep the Navy from invading its long-range bombing domain. Then the Army joined the pitched battle with still a third guided missile, according to the rumors.
And the flying disks? Army, Navy, and Air Force missiles, launched in droves all over the country to prove whose was the best? A public missile race, with the joint Chiefs of Staff to decide the winner!
It seems fantastic that this theory would be believed by any intelligent person. In effect, it accuses the armed services of deliberate, criminal negligence, of endangering millions in the cities below.
I am convinced that some of these rumors led to at least one of the published guesses about our missile program. One widely publicized story stated that the flying saucers seen hurtling through our skies are actually two types of secret weapons. One, according to radio and newspaper accounts, is a disk that whizzes through space, halts suspended in the air, soars to thirty thousand feet, drops to one thousand feet, and then usually disintegrates in the air.
These saucers, it was said, ranged from 20 inches to 250 feet in diameter. They were supposed to be pilotless—and harmless.
The second type was said to be a jet version of the Navy’s circular airfoil “Flying Flapjack.” It was credited with fantastic speed.
The “true disks,” however, were mainly Air Force devices, according to the report.
“Some are guided, others are not,” said the radio commentator who released this story. “They can stay stationary, dash off to right or left, and move like lightning. But they are utterly harmless.”
In these “harmless” disks there was supposed to be an explosive charge that destroyed them in mid-air at a predetermined time.
Within a few days after this story was broadcast, the United States News and World Report declared that the saucers are real, and identified them as jet models of Navy “Flying Flapjacks.” This magazine, which is not an official publication despite its name, mentioned the variable-direction jet principle that I had previously described in the True article.