Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [76]
The “capture” of the flying saucer near Roswell understandably caused some anxiety. Now aliens were after us! After communists, it seemed there was nothing Americans feared more than little green men.
Not to worry, said the air force. On July 9 it issued a press release saying the debris recovered near Roswell was merely the remains of a crashed weather balloon. (In 1994 the Pentagon would say it was actually a top-secret listening device used to detect nuclear tests in the Soviet Union.) Still, the air force was determined to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon, and in the fall of 1947 it launched an investigation that would eventually spawn the famous Project Blue Book.
On July 10, 1947, just two days after the flying saucer was reported captured near Roswell, President Truman was asked at a press conference if he had “seen any flying saucers.” “Only in the newspapers,” was all Truman said, prompting much laughter from the reporters.
Truman, however, took the matter quite seriously. In 1948, he summoned his air force aide, General Robert B. Landry, to the Oval Office. Landry said the president told him “the collection and evaluation of UFO data … warranted more intense study and attention at the highest government level.” Truman ordered Landry to consult with the appropriate government agencies and report directly to him quarterly “as to whether or not any UFO incidents … could be considered as having any strategic threatening implications at all.” This Landry did for more than four years. “Nothing of substance considered credible or threatening to the country was ever received from intelligence,” Landry recalled.
Still, the sightings continued. In the summer of 1952, Truman’s own house was buzzed by flying saucers. It all began on a steamy Saturday night, July 19. On the top floor of the control tower at Washington National Airport, an air traffic controller named Joe Zacko saw a mysterious blip on his radar screen. Then he looked out the window and saw a bright light in the sky. He pointed it out to his partner, Howard Cocklin. “If you believe in flying saucers,” Zacko said to Cocklin, “that sure could be one.”
Suddenly the bright light shot away at an incredible speed. “Did you see that?” Cocklin said. “What the hell was that?”
Radar screens at two nearby air force bases also picked up unidentified blips that night, and a pilot reported seeing unusual objects in the sky near the capital, “like falling stars without tails.” Three days later the Washington Post reported on the “eerie visitation”—“perhaps a new type of ‘flying saucer,'” the paper helpfully speculated. Soon the sultry capital was swept up in a UFO frenzy. Up to fifty sightings a day were reported. A State Department employee saw a small light in the sky that “floated around in space” and disappeared. A radio station engineer saw mysterious lights near the station’s transmission tower.
On the night of July 26—a week after the first sightings—controllers at National reported at least a dozen more unusual blips. This time the air force dispatched two F-94 jets to investigate. The pilots saw strange lights. One tried to give chase but couldn’t catch the lights—even though his jet was capable of speeds approaching six hundred miles per hour.
Truman demanded answers, but the Pentagon was hard pressed to deliver them. An air force official said he was “fairly well convinced there is nothing in the phenomenon to indicate that it is a menace to the country,” but added that he could not “discount entirely that they are visitations from a foreign country or another planet.” “Perhaps it’s due to the heavy use of TV during the conventions,” a navy official speculated. (The Republican and Democratic national conventions took place around the same time as the sightings.)
Eventually the Pentagon settled on an answer that seemed to satisfy both the