Going over the cases, I realized that Purdy and his staff had dug up at least fifty reports that had not appeared in the papers. (A few of these proved incorrect, but a check with the Air Force case reports released on December 30, 1949, showed that True’s files contained all the important items.) These cases included sightings at eleven Air Force bases and fourteen American airports, reports from ships at sea, and a score of encounters by airline and private pilots.
Witnesses included Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force officers; state and city police; F.B.I. agents; weather observers, shipmasters, astronomers, and thousands of good solid American citizens. I learned later that many witnesses had been investigated by the F.B.I. to weed out crackpot reports.
I ended up badly puzzled. The evidence was more impressive than I had suspected. It was plain that many reports had been entirely suppressed, or at least kept out of the papers. There was something ominous about it. No matter what the answer, it was serious enough to be kept carefully hidden.
If it were a Soviet missile, I thought, God help us. They’d scooped up a lot of Nazi scientists and war secrets. And the Germans had been far ahead of us on guided missiles. But why would they give us a two-year warning, testing the things openly over America? It didn’t make sense.
CHAPTER IV
I went to the Pentagon the next morning. I didn’t expect to learn much, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t tangling with security.
I’d worked with Al Scholin and Orville Splitt, in the magazine section of Public Relations, and I thought they’d tell me as much as anyone. When I walked in, I sprang it on them cold.
“What’s the chance of seeing your Project ‘Saucer’ files?”
Al Scholin took it more or less dead-pan. Splitt looked at me a moment and then grinned.
“Don’t tell me you believe the things are real?”