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The air force responded by releasing the six-hundred-page Grudge Report (completed the previous August) on December 27, 1949, and announced the project’s termination. It strongly implied that it would no longer investigate reports of unidentified flying objects, and repeated the thesis that UFO reports were “the result of: (1) misinterpretation of various conventional objects; (2) a mild form of mass hysteria; or (3) hoaxes.”⁴³

Press coverage was either sympathetic or apathetic, but in any case uncritical. The media failed to pick up on the significance of a 23 percent unexplained ratio. Instead, it acted as a nearly single entity in accepting the air force’s “final word” on the subject, that there was nothing to the UFO phenomenon. The Grudge Report therefore received minimal publicity. History repeated itself twenty years later, when the deeply flawed Colorado University study of UFOs encountered a similarly compliant media that read introductions instead of data.

UFO SECRECY AND PUBLICITY IN EARLY 1950

On the night of January 22-23, 1950, near the Bering Sea at Kodiak, Alaska, navy patrol pilot Lieutenant Smith made a routine security flight. At 2:40 A.M., he obtained a radar reading of an object twenty miles north, which quickly vanished. Eight minutes later, he picked up either the same or a different object. He radioed Kodiak to learn that no known aircraft were in the area. The Kodiak radar officer then reported that he was receiving interference, the likes of which he had never experienced.

At about 3 A.M., the USS Tillamock was south of Kodiak when one of the men on deck saw “a very fast-moving red glow light, which appeared to be of exhaust nature.” The object came from the southeast, moved clockwise in a large circle around Kodiak, and returned to the southeast. Another officer came out to look, saw it in view for thirty seconds, and described it as like “a large ball of orange fire.” No sound came from the source of the light.

At 4:40 A.M., Lieutenant Smith, still on airborne patrol and experiencing no radar problems, now picked up another blip on his radar—so fast that it left a trail on his screen. Smith called his crew, who immediately saw the object close a five mile gap in ten seconds, an apparent speed of 1,800 mph. He tried to pursue the object, but it was too maneuverable. Witnesses described two orange lights that rotated around a common center. At some point the object made a sharp turn and headed directly toward Smith’s plane. He “considered this to be a highly threatening gesture” and turned off his lights. The UFO flew by and disappeared.

At least thirty-six copies of the navy’s detailed report were sent to various security agencies, including the CIA, FBI, air force intelligence, and the Department of State. None of these copies were ever released or published, although a truncated FBI copy surfaced in the 1970s as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The document’s explanation: “the objects must be regarded as phenomena ... the exact nature of which could not be determined. ”⁴⁴

And yet publicly, the air force had stopped investigating UFOs! Ruppelt claimed that UFO investigations at this time rated “minimum effort.” The old Project Grudge files, he said, had been “chucked into an old storage case,” and many reports were missing when he sifted through them a few years later. What, then, of the Kodiak case? We do not know the military’s response to this, but Ruppelt noted that early in 1950, the director of air force intelligence (one of the recipients of the Kodiak report) sent a letter to ATIC indicating that he had never issued any order to end Project Grudge. ATIC replied weakly that it had not actually disbanded Grudge but merely transferred its project functions and no longer considered it a special project. It is possible that the Kodiak incident sparked this exchange.⁴⁵

Throughout the early part of 1950, bizarre accounts of alien crashes and bodies persisted. Time’s January 9 issue reported rumors about crashed saucers and small humanoid bodies in New Mexico. A January 16 air force intelligence memo to headquarters reported that stories of crashed saucers in the Southwest were making the rounds in Denver, and were reported in a Kansas City newspaper. The bodies were said to be three feet tall, and the recovered metals defied analysis.⁴⁶

In March, J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a memo: “Just what are the facts re ‘flying saucers’? A short memo as to whether or not it is true or just what air force, etc., think of them.” The air force replied with the standard “misidentifications” and “weather balloons” routine. We do not know what Hoover’s response was.⁴⁷ On March 18, the air force publicly denied that UFOs were secret missiles or space-exploration devices.⁴⁸