In September, Air Defense Command in Columbus, Ohio, asked Leonard Stringfield if he would help screen GOC reports from southwestern Ohio. It wanted the local Ground Observer Corps to forward UFO reports to him, which he would evaluate and the best of which he would pass to ADC. ADC asked only that Stringfield not ask any questions; he agreed. He later learned that air force jets were scrambled several times on the basis of his reports. Once again, the evidence is that ADC, not ATIC, was doing the serious work on UFOs. Stringfield served for two years in this capacity and gathered that the air force private and public activities regarding UFOs were very different.126
On October 14, Keyhoe learned of a “Crashed Object” program at the 4602nd AISS, which someone within the unit had leaked to his friend Lou Corbin. According to the informant, the program was known as the “investigation of unidentified crashed objects.” Corbin told Keyhoe that he “got the impression they’d recovered some kind of ‘objects’—probably something dropped from a saucer.” Corbin also related a recent encounter he had had with an air force captain who had just returned from Alaska. When Corbin asked why the air force was so secretive about flying saucers, the captain angrily blurted out, “What good would it do you if you did know the truth?”127
In the wake of the global rush of up-close-and-personal UFO sightings, one obvious question was, how much did the U.S. authorities know about it? Certainly, Keyhoe had known of it, and even Blue Book contained a report from that period describing a UFO occupant. The incident occurred in the Azores Islands on September 21, 1954. An airport guard reported a ten-foot-wide metallic blue object with a clear glass or plastic nose. It made a humming sound, hovered, and landed vertically about fifty feet from the witness. A normal-sized blond man emerged from the object, spoke in an unknown language, and patted the witness on the shoulder. The strange man returned to the craft, attached a harness, pressed a button, and ascended vertically. The total encounter lasted three minutes. This incident was listed in the Blue Book files not as a hoax, but as an unknown! Other Blue Book unknowns in late 1954 occurred in the Philippines, Japan, Iceland, Greenland, Morocco, and South Africa—in addition to a rash of quality sightings within the American Midwest. These facts, combined with the knowledge that America had close military relationships with most of the countries experiencing UFO sightings, give us strong reason to believe that American authorities had a very good, if not total, awareness of what was going on.
One thing we know for certain: no one can ascribe these UFO encounters to America’s secret U-2 spy plane—a favorite recourse from the CIA’s official historian, Gerald Haines. On December 1, 1954, the CIA’s Richard Bissell, in conjunction with the Pentagon, initiated the development of the U- 2. It would not fly until August 1955.128
At a press conference on December 16, President Eisenhower was asked about flying saucers and the recent attention they had been getting from European governments. Eisenhower repeated the air force statement that such things existed “only in the imaginations of the viewers.” When asked whether he believed they were extraterrestrial, Eisenhower gave a good example of circumlocution. The last time he talked on this subject, he said, an air force official whom he trusted had told him that, as far as he knew, it was “inaccurate” to believe that the objects were coming from another planet. The air force supported Eisenhower by stating there was “no evidence that we are being observed by machines from outer space, or by a foreign power.”129
It is unclear whether Eisenhower actually believed what he said. Immediately after the press conference, he asked the air force for a full briefing on the latest UFO developments. Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott admitted as much in a talk at the National Press Club.130
By the end of 1954, two things were all too clear. First, UFO sightings and landings were worldwide, and completely beyond the ability of the United States to affect. If one accepts the witness reports, several types of aliens appeared to be examining the world’s life-forms-including human life—and conducting some sort of global survey. These aliens did not always care whether humans observed them but they did not want people pestering them, and showed no desire to interact or “make their presence known” to humans in any official way.
