UFOs - Leslie Kean [54]
Project Sign was later renamed Project Grudge, which then became the well-known Project Blue Book in 1951, lasting for nineteen years. As time passed, it continued to become naggingly clear that these objects did not belong to any foreign government, and we had to face the clear possibility that they did not originate here on Earth. U.S. government documents released through the FOIA show that, as a result, some officials from multiple branches of government continued to assert that they might be interplanetary. As before, other factions stuck to their hope of finding a conventional explanation, no matter what.
In July 1952, the FBI was briefed through the office of Major General John Samford, the director of intelligence for the Air Force, and told that it was “not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars.” Air intelligence was “fairly certain” that they were not “ships or missiles from another nation in this world,”4 the FBI memo reports. Another FBI memo stated some months later that “some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of planetary ships.”5
At the same time, national defense concerns were mounting about the preponderance of technologically advanced unidentified objects flying over the United States during the Cold War. One famous series of sightings over the nation’s capitol, in which Air Force planes were sent to intercept brilliant objects picked up by ground radar, made national headlines in July 1952, and necessitated a press conference, the biggest one since World War II, in which intelligence chief General Samford tried to calm the country. He said:
Air Force interest in the problem has been due to our feeling of an obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability, anything in the air that has the possibility of [being] a threat or menace to the United States. In pursuit of this obligation, since 1947, we have received and analyzed between one and two thousand reports that have come to us from all kinds of sources. Of this great mass of reports, we have been able adequately to explain the great bulk of them—explain them to our own satisfaction. However, there are then a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It is this group of observations that we now are attempting to resolve. We have, as of date, come to only one firm conclusion with respect to this remaining percentage. And that is that it does not contain any pattern of purpose or of consistency that we can relate to any conceivable threat to the United States.6
He told reporters that the Washington, D.C., events were likely mere aberrations caused by temperature inversions—layers in the atmosphere in which rising temperatures affect radar performance—an interpretation disputed by the pilots and radar operators involved.
The increasing numbers of reports were becoming hard to manage along with growing public interest in the phenomenon. In late 1952, H. Marshall Chadwell, assistant director of scientific intelligence for the CIA, sent a memo about this problem to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). “Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and travelling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles,”7 he stated.
In another 1952 memo, titled “Flying Saucers,” the CIA’s Chadwell said the DCI must be “empowered” to initiate the research necessary “to solve the problem of instant positive identification of unidentified flying objects.” The CIA recognized the need for a “national policy” as to “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic,”8 according to government documents. It was therefore decided that the DCI would “enlist the services of selected scientists to review and appraise the available evidence.”9 As a result of this decision,