A week after the sighting, the official Blue Book report stated “all logical leads have been exhausted in an effort to identify the object.” Yet the Pentagon overruled Blue Book on October 11, when unnamed officers told reporters that Harris had seen the planet Venus, or possibly a research balloon. Harris shot back that they were “really off the beam.” The object he saw “was saucer-shaped, had a gray color, and moved under intelligent control. I got within three miles of it, and that is a lot closer than Venus is. I have seen a lot of balloons, too, and this was no balloon.” It became obvious that the Venus explanation was impossible, and the air force dropped it. Eventually, it dropped the balloon explanation as well. The eventual explanation was “sun dog,” also known as a mock sun and parhelia. Menzel endorsed it, despite the fact that sun dogs do not move, and that several witnesses clearly saw the object move. No one bothered to tell Harris of the official explanation until atmospheric physicist James MacDonald asked him in 1966 if he knew what a sun dog was. (Harris did.) Both agreed that the official explanation was impossible.157
MOVING TO 1962
In the fall of 1961, NICAP obtained a photocopy of an air force intelligence sketch of a flying saucer. This came from a restricted manual for intelligence officers titled AFM 200-3. Somebody in the military had forgotten to reclassify it as Confidential when the Restricted classification was canceled. 158 More information slipped out from unmanageable sources. In November 1961, Wilbert Smith was speaking at length in an interview with two Ohio UFO researchers, C. W Fitch and George Popovitch. He reiterated that he had handled “quite a bit” of UFO hardware and some “very strange metal,” which had been recovered around July 1, 1960. He said:
We are speculating that what we have is a portion of a very large device which came into this solar system ... we don’t know when ... but it had been in space a long time before it came to Earth; we can tell by the micrometeorites embedded in the surface. But we don’t know whether it was a few years ago—or a few hundred years ago.
Smith also said that he had shown his friend and fellow NICAP board member Adm. H. B. Knowles a piece which had been shot from a small flying saucer near Washington during the July 1952 flap, and which had been loaned to him briefly by the U.S. Air Force. Smith emphasized that it was not the American air force but “a small group very high up in the government” who determined UFO policy.159
Air force intelligence decided to select personnel for two secret projects in November 1961: Moon Dust and Blue Fly. A classified memo about Moon Dust stated:
Moon Dust: As a specialized aspect of its overall material exploitation program, Headquarters USAF has established Project Moon Dust to locate, recover, and deliver descended foreign space vehicles.... Blue Fly: Operation Blue Fly has been established to facilitate expeditious delivery to FTD [the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division based at Wright Field in Ohio] of Moon Dust or other items of great technical intelligence interest.
These ... peacetime projects all involve a potential for employment of qualified field intelligence personnel on a quick reaction basis to recover or perform field exploitation of unidentified flying objects....
Journalist Howard Blum called this a UFO SWAT team. What these teams actually did, however, remains largely speculation. Other than this document, information on either project is scarce. The argument can be made that these two projects were related to terrestrial satellites. Still, the inclusion of the phrase “unidentified flying objects” appears to make the connection with unconventional craft explicit.160
HILLENKOETTER RESIGNS FROM NICAP
By early 1962, according to Keyhoe, the CIA struck at NICAP in order to block a threatened showdown which might have ended the UFO cover-up. This is entirely plausible. Although NICAP had lost battle after battle, it continued to fight doggedly on. In February, a plan was germinating among congressmen to end UFO secrecy using a statement by Roscoe Hillenkoetter, by far NICAP’s most prestigious member. Keyhoe was involved in these machinations and met with “a congressman who had strongly supported Karth” to discuss the strategy of bringing the UFO matter to the congressional floor. This congressman confirmed to Keyhoe that Hillenkoetter would be a key person involved. Keyhoe therefore planned to see Hillenkoetter directly at his residence in New York. The telephone did not seem like a good idea.
