Ancillary Mercy полностью

The next day, on September 12, 1951, a three-foot-long teletype arrived at Wright-Patterson AFB from Fort Monmouth, a copy of which went to Washington, D.C. Almost immediately, ATIC’s new chief, Col. Frank Dunn, received a phone call from the office of the director of air force intelligence, Maj. Gen. Charles Cabell. Cabell wanted somebody from ATIC to get down to New Jersey and find out what was going on. Dunn sent Lt. Jerry Cummings (head of what remained of Project Grudge) and Lt. Col. N. R. Rosengarten. A few days later, the two officers briefed Cabell at a meeting that included his entire staff “and a special representative from Republic Aircraft Corporation.” Ruppelt’s words on this matter once again hint toward the existence of some kind of MJ-12 group:

The man from Republic supposedly represented a group of top U.S. industrialists and scientists who thought that there should be a lot more sensible answers coming from the air force regarding the UFOs. The man was at the meeting at the personal request of a general officer.

According to Ruppelt,

every word of the two-hour meeting was recorded on a wire recorder. The recording was so hot that it was later destroyed, but not before I heard it several times. I can’t tell everything that was said but, to be conservative, it didn’t exactly follow the tone of the official air force releases.

Cabell supposedly learned at this meeting that Grudge had effectively been dead for some time. He demanded to know “who in hell has been giving me these reports that every decent flying saucer report is being investigated?” He ordered the men to get moving and report to him when a new project was ready to go.⁷⁸

As a result, Ruppelt was placed in charge of the “new” Project Grudge. He soon appointed Hynek (already an air force consultant in astronomy) as chief scientific consultant. But Grudge continued to lack funds to do serious investigating. Just how important could the new and improved Project Grudge have been to a national security establishment that had undertaken the Manhattan Project, won the Second World War, and was fighting communism in Korea, when it even lacked a routine way of getting fresh UFO reports? UFOs were violating restricted and sensitive American airspace with complete impunity practically every month, and the air force continued to dole out the fiction that Grudge’s pathetic operation was the vehicle for meeting that threat.

There was an undeniable discrepancy between the public and real policy regarding UFO reporting. The official and public version had all reports going to ATIC; the real policy was that each branch of military reported UFOs, but many of those reports never made it to ATIC. JANAP 146(B), authorized in August 1949, made it clear that all important reports went elsewhere: to Air Defense Command, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA, and “other appropriate agencies.” Could one such “agency” be the group of “scientists and industrialists” described by Ruppelt? Since they had unlimited access to ATIC files, it is at least plausible that they had comparable access to navy and army files, and possibly CIA or FBI files. Whoever comprised this nebulous and powerful group, they are the best candidates for being managers of the “real” investigation, of which ATIC’s contribution was merely a share.

Why, then, did Cabell get so angry over the dilapidated state of what he had to know was a fiction of an organization? As director of air force intelligence, Cabell knew that the UFO problem was being monitored at levels higher than ATIC, as indicated by the presence of the “man from Republic” in his office. The most probable scenario is that from the summer of 1948 onward—that is, following Vandenberg’s rejection of the Estimate of the Situation—the main policy was to keep Project Sign/Grudge in the dark. Most likely, the main contours of the UFO problem were evident enough to those at the top that it seemed counterproductive to continue stirring the pot at the lower levels, when the result would not be new information about UFOs but simply heightened interest by those who did not need to know. This would be especially important regarding Grudge, since it was publicly known to be the military’s UFO investigative body, and as such, was the key to the Pentagon’s public relations on the subject. The last thing desirable would be to have your most visible office actually believe in UFOs. The best way to avoid this would be to strangle the flow of good information going into ATIC, as much as could reasonably be done.

Cabell had never entirely agreed with Grudge policy. For several years, he had wanted to augment its reporting capabilities, although his efforts met with failure. Perhaps he thought that the last two months presented him with the chance to drive home his point that better UFO reporting was needed, that the new wave of activity warranted a new approach. Maybe not everything was known about the UFOs.