I was directed to report quarterly to the president after consulting with Central Intelligence people, as to whether or not any UFO incidents received by them could be considered as having any strategic threatening implications at all. The report was to be made orally by me unless it was considered by intelligence to be so serious or alarming as to warrant a more detailed report in writing. During the four and one-half years in office there, all reports were made orally. Nothing of substance considered credible or threatening to the country was ever received from intelligence.
Landry downplayed Truman’s interest in all this, but several things stand out.
1. Landry gave Truman quarterly briefings for four and a half years, through the end of Truman’s presidency, adding up to possibly eighteen briefings. All this, even though Truman supposedly thought little of UFOs.
2. Landry was Truman’s liaison with the CIA regarding UFO reports, providing independent confirmation of Hillenkoetter’s remark to Keyhoe that the CIA was interested in UFO reports from very early on.
3. Landry’s reports were oral, which he interpreted as therefore not significant. But such a claim does not follow logically, and in fact the reverse is more plausible. As CIA Director Richard Helms once put the matter, “the first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper.”
LATE 1948: KEY DEVELOPMENTS
UFO sightings dropped off somewhat within America, but American military personnel still reported them everywhere. On October 1, 1948, an Air National Guard F-51 pilot in Fargo, North Dakota, named Thomas Gorman had a dogfight with a small, flat, circular UFO. While flying, Gorman saw a light about eight inches in diameter displaying incredible movements. He repeatedly gave chase, each time outmaneuvered by the object. It eventually departed upward at high speed. Gorman said he “had the distinct impression that its maneuvers were controlled by thought or reason.” Others witnessed this bizarre encounter. The light was seen near the aircraft by control tower operators and people from other locations at all angles. All gave consistent descriptions of what they saw. The air force, nevertheless, said that Gorman and the other witnesses had seen a lighted balloon. UFO researcher Jerome Clark agreed, calling this case greatly overrated. Others disagreed. Jacques Vallee put the matter this way: “twenty-minute ball lightning would be more surprising to the physicists than flying saucers piloted by vegetable men.” James McDonald years later reinvestigated the sighting, concluding that it was indeed valid, and something extraordinary.12
Two weeks later, on October 16, came a remarkable UFO sighting in Cache, Japan. This was an encounter of an F-61 Black Widow aircraft with an indeterminate number of UFOs. While on night patrol, the pilot and his crew picked up an object on radar at about 200 mph. As he closed to intercept, the object speeded up to 1,200 mph, then slowed down again. Six times the crew tried to close on the UFO; each time, the object accelerated out of reach. On one pass the crew saw the object’s silhouette, which looked “like a rifle bullet” twenty to thirty feet long. Intelligence reports indicated the UFO carried radar warning equipment, because it “seemed cognizant of the whereabouts of the F-61 at all times.” The sighting certainly impressed itself upon the pilot, who stated that “in my opinion, we were shown a new type of aircraft by some agency unknown to us.”13
More radar sightings occurred in early November at Goose Bay, Labrador, and Japan. During the night of November 18, near Andrews AFB in Maryland, a strange chase took place by a USAF Reserve pilot in pursuit of an oval-shaped UFO that appeared as something like a ball of light (reminiscent of the Gorman case).14 Then, on November 23, the first documented simultaneous visual and radar sighting of an unidentified flying object took place at Fursten-Felbruck AFB near Munich. An object was detected circling rapidly at twenty-seven thousand feet. An F-80 pilot sent to intercept described it as bright red. While he was moving to intercept, the object abruptly climbed to fifty thousand feet—at 900 mph, far beyond the capability of any known aircraft. A second F-80 pilot verified the report. According to the air force intelligence officers investigating the encounter, the object was not a balloon, and there were no reported aircraft in the area. The object, in fact, was “nothing we know of.” To the investigator, there remained a slim possibility that the object was some kind of experimental aircraft, except for the problem that such craft were “not in Germany, can [not] climb twenty-three thousand feet in a matter of minutes, [nor] travel 900 miles per hour.” The sighting was never officially solved.15
THE GREEN FIREBALLS
