The Air Force quickly denied having anything resembling the! objects Captain Smith described.
“We have no experimental craft of that nature in Idaho—or anywhere else,” an official said in Washington. “We’re completely mystified.”
The Navy said it had made an investigation, and had no answers. There had been rumors that the disks were “souped-up” versions of the Navy’s “Flying Flapjack,” a twin-engined circular craft known technically as the XF-5-U-1. But the Navy insisted that only one model had been built, and that it was now out of service.
In Chicago, two astronomers spiked guesses that the disks might be meteors. Dr. Girard Kieuper, director of the University of Chicago observatory, said flatly that they couldn’t be meteors. “They’re probably man-made,” he told the A.P. Dr. Oliver Lee, director of Northwestern’s observatory, agreed with Kieuper.
“The Army, Navy, and Air Force are working secretly on all sorts of things,” he said. “Remember the A-bomb secrecy—and the radar signals to the moon.”
As I went through Purdy’s summary, I recalled my own reaction after the United Airlines report. After seeing the Pentagon comment, I had called up Captain Tom Brown, at Air Force Public Relations.
“Are you really taking this seriously?” I asked him.
“Well, we can’t just ignore it,” he said. “There are too many reliable pilots telling the same story—flat, round objects able to outmaneuver ordinary planes, and faster than anything we have. Too many stories tally.”
I told him I’d heard that the Civil Air Patrol in Wisconsin and other states was starting a sky search.
“We’ve got a jet at Muroc, and six fighters standing by at Portland right now,” Brown said.