Ancillary Mercy полностью

By mid-1947, the reorganization and expansion of America’s national security apparatus was well under way, and a fair portion of this remained covert. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the UFO problem emerged within the American military before it became a public issue. Yet, on the eve of the Kenneth Arnold sighting, no one could have foreseen just how big the UFO problem would become.

Chapter 2

Saucers in the Skies: 1947

The first rule in keeping secrets is “nothing on paper.”

—CIA Director Richard Helms

CRESCENDO

In the summer of 1947, flying saucer mania spread across America. Millions of people read about strange objects that were seen throughout the country and seemed to defy the standard rules of flight. Were flying saucers some odd, unknown natural phenomenon? Were they mechanical objects, and if so, whose? A communist stratagem? War nerves? Hoaxes? A new fad? Rubbish? Everyone wondered, no one knew.

Before Kenneth Arnold sparked the flying saucer frenzy on June 24, there had been a steady buildup of odd things in the sky. On June 2, 1947, a UFO sighting occurred at Rehoboth, Delaware, which the air force investigated. Not much is known about it: the case is missing from the Blue Book files, although in theory Blue Book was the comprehensive repository of unidentified sightings reported to the air force. The air force also investigated a Weiser, Idaho, report from June 12, describing two strange, fast-moving objects. Around noon on the twenty-first, residents of Spokane, Washington, reported eight disc-shaped objects about the size of a house, said to be flying at around 600 mph. The objects then fell with a “dead leaf” motion, landing on the shore of the Saint Joe River in Idaho before ten witnesses. On the twenty-third, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a railroad engineer saw ten shiny, fluttering disc-shaped objects in a line high in the sky. That same day, pilot Richard Rankin saw a formation of ten objects in Bakersfield, California, flying north. They, too, seemed to be disc-like, with a diameter of about one hundred feet, flying in formation at a good speed, anywhere from 300 to 600 mph. Dick Rankin was a respected pilot with over seven thousand hours of flight-time experience. His sighting remains unidentified.¹

These sightings, all by civilians, eventually gained some publicity. But the series of sightings which began that month at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee remained unknown to the public for years. Oak Ridge was the atomic testing facility for the Atomic Energy Commission, housing some of the world’s most sophisticated technology. In 1947, nuclear technology was cutting edge, and the U.S. government severely restricted access to it. Violating the airspace over Oak Ridge was a very serious matter. And yet something, according to a declassified FBI document, without authorization flew over Oak Ridge that June (another FBI document mentioned July). This object was photographed by a civilian employee, a resident engineer with Air Material Command. A 1949 FBI memo to Hoover discussing this noted that at least twenty-four copies of the photograph had been made, and said that an unnamed source asked the employee to recover all of them and bring them to air force intelligence. He complied. According to the FBI document, the witness “further stated that [blacked out] had appeared extremely concerned over the matter and seemed quite emphatic that the matter should be given no more publicity than was absolutely necessary.”

UFO sightings over Oak Ridge continued with great frequency during the late 1940s and beyond. A number of them were radar and visual cases, although the radar and visuals were reported from different locations. The events caused great concern at the FBI Field Office in Knoxville, the U.S. Third Army, and the Atomic Energy Commission’s security division at Oak Ridge. A classified FBI report from November 1950 listed a recent spate of sightings over the facility in a chronological summary.²

THE FLOODGATES OPEN