At midnight, Lakenheath notified the RAF station at Neatishead, Norfolk, that a strange object was buzzing the base. A Venom night fighter, with four highly technically trained personnel, was scrambled. All four soon found the object on radar and saw it as a bright white light, which then disappeared. The crew found the target north of Cambridge; the navigator said it was the “clearest target I have ever seen on radar.” The object, however, was behind the plane, and stayed there for some time, despite climbs, dives, and circling. Ground radar operators said the object was glued right behind the Venom fighter. After ten minutes, the fighter headed back. The UFO followed briefly, then stopped and hovered. Another Venom was scrambled but experienced equipment malfunctions and aborted its mission. The object was tracked on two radars leaving the area at 600 mph.
The encounter was classified until 1969, when it was analyzed in the University of Colorado UFO Project, also known as the Condon Committee. It was listed as unknown and indeed as one of the most compelling of all cases. Physicist Gordon David Thayer, who studied the incident for the project, called it “the most puzzling and unusual” of radar/visual cases. He suggested that “the apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation of this sighting.”178
SUMMARY
The year 1953 had started with the Robertson Panel and a defeated faction that opposed secrecy about UFOs. The memory of unidentified objects over the Capitol was still fresh. Three years later not a single group within the U.S. military or intelligence apparatus dared to challenge a policy that became progressively more restrictive over divulging UFO information. Fresh outbursts of dissent did come from outside. Keyhoe continued to be a nuisance, Edward Ruppelt took his stand, and other big names occasionally supported the idea of UFOs as extraterrestrial. Yet, there can be no mistaking this period as repressive regarding UFOs.
The policy of repression was partly responsible for the relatively low number of well-documented sightings during 1955 and 1956. In several cases, civilian and military pilots were muzzled after initially talking, and in the case of Capt. Raymond Ryan, CAA logs may have been falsified. It may well be, however, that actual UFO activity did decline during those years, and it is unlikely that UFO awareness would have emerged on the strength of things seen during those two years. In the context, however, of the years of sightings that had preceded them, some of these remained quite compelling.
Through it all, the national security apparatus retained the initiative on managing UFO information. Project Blue Book became inconsequential, while Air Defense Command received many of the key UFO reports. The CIA also retained an interest in UFO reports, both domestically and worldwide, and certainly not because of the U-2 program. Citizen groups, meanwhile, were a peripheral and ineffective lot. But in late 1956, a civilian group that was led by a core of Annapolis boys made a play to challenge the air force on UFOs. What the leaders of this new group, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), did not realize, however, was that the CIA was already on board.
Chapter 6
The Fight to End Secrecy: 1956 to 1962
I’m positive they don’t [exist].... There’s not even a glimmer of hope for the UFO.
The air force cannot do any more under the circumstances. It has
been a difficult assignment for them, and I believe we should not continue
to criticize their investigations. I am resigning as a member of the
NICAP board of governors.
THE BIRTH OF NICAP
The air force’s monopoly on UFO information could not last forever. Although other civilian UFO groups had emerged in the 1950s, none challenged the authority of the air force to have the final word. NICAP did. Founded on August 29, 1956, by Townsend Brown in Washington, D.C., it soon developed into an organization dedicated to ending UFO secrecy.
