Ancillary Mercy полностью

One remarkable thing about the Grudge Report is how opposite its tone was from the “Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S.,” which, after all, had been finalized only the previous December. That report had recognized the reality of UFOs, assumed the sighted objects were craft of some sort, and gave strong consideration that the Soviets were behind it. What had happened in a mere eight months to overthrow this assessment? The phenomenon had not gone away. If anything, it had become more serious, and a wider group within the classified world was now concerned. Nor had the Grudge team suddenly solved the UFO phenomenon. This was 1949, the height of the cold war. American defense analysts were continuing to harden their policy toward the Soviets, which by the spring of 1950 would culminate in NSC-68, an alarmist statement that in effect warned Truman that the United States was losing the cold war. Within such a context of unexplained airspace violations, of agitation and bewilderment expressed by nearly every sector of the defense establishment, during the very month that the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device, what is one to make of this cavalier disregard of unexplained objects in American skies known as the Grudge Report? With everything known about the nature of the UFO problem in 1949 and the overall context of the cold war, one must conclude that the Grudge Report flies in the face of defense logic. It does, however, comply entirely with the needs of the defense community to manage the UFO problem from a public relations standpoint. The Grudge Report had no scientific value, but was of supreme value as a management tool. In the twenty-first century, along with various statements about UFOs by the air force, CIA, NSA, NASA, and other organizations, it continues to retain this value as part of the official explanatory structure, as a way to manage the intractable problem of UFOs.

So much for the famed Grudge Report. By the late summer of 1949, AMC stated that the green fireball phenomena would no longer be included in its UFO reports. Does this mean that the fireballs were officially discounted as unidentified flying objects? Not exactly. AMC simply handed the fireball problem to the air force’s Cambridge Research Laboratory, which established what became known as Project Twinkle. The plan was to triangulate and photograph the fireballs through three cinetheodolite stations. Dr. Lincoln La Paz directed the effort. By mid-September of 1949, Hoyt Vandenberg ordered the new AMC commander, Lt. Gen. Benjamin Chidlaw, to have his Boston labs evaluate the New Mexico and Texas sightings, and to consider the creation of an instrument network.⁴⁰

Meanwhile, the Los Alamos meetings continued. On October 14, 1949, sixteen representatives from the U.S. 4th Army, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, FBI, AEC, Geophysical Research Division of Air Material Command, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations met to discuss the green fireballs. In the words of an AFOSI confidential memo, “... the continued occurrence of unexplained phenomena of this nature in the vicinity of sensitive installations is cause for concern.” The debate was not whether the phenomenon was real, but whether it was natural or artificial. UFO researcher Jerome Clark later pointed out that if the fireballs were all natural phenomena, why would they be localized in New Mexico, and why so recently? The meeting attendees probably wondered the same thing.⁴¹

Sometime during the fall of 1949 there occurred a UFO sighting over “a key atomic base,” possibly in New Mexico, involving a high-ranking air force officer and the tracking by radar of five apparently metallic UFOs. The objects flew over the base “at tremendous speed and great height.” Radar tracked them at up to one hundred thousand feet, moving three hundred miles in less than four minutes (about 4,500 mph). The incident is one of many missing from the archived Blue Book files but was reported in a 1952 Life magazine article. According to UFO researcher Richard Hall, there is “no doubt about its authenticity,” even though the case eludes complete documentation.⁴²

“THE FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL!”

In late December 1949, Donald Keyhoe’s article “The Flying Saucers are Real” appeared in True Magazine. Keyhoe argued that the higher-ups in the military, primarily the air force, knew that flying saucers were real, were of alien origin, and were covering up the information from the public in order to avoid panic. The edition was True’s best-selling ever, and the air force found itself buried under letters, telegrams, and phone calls demanding information about the flying saucers.