Ancillary Mercy полностью

Back at Washington National, the objects reappeared shortly before dawn, and two more F-94s were scrambled. The pilots obtained radar locks and moved toward the targets. Again, the objects sped away. Eventually, one appeared to stay put, and an F-94 moved to intercept. The target then disappeared.

Dewey Fournet was in the Washington National tower throughout the night. He said that everyone in the radar room believed the targets were “very probably caused by solid metallic objects.” One of the F-94 pilots, William Patterson, commented, “I saw several bright lights. I was at my maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed.” An air force intelligence report, classified until 1985, stated that the entire radar crew was emphatic that the returns were solid, and not temperature inversions or other atmospheric phenomena. Years later, Dewey Fournet and Al Chop restated this belief.

Everyone, even the anti-UFO New York Times, reported air force efforts to intercept objects over Washington. At 10 A.M. on the morning of the twenty-seventh, President Harry Truman told his air force liaison, Robert B. Landry, to find out what was going on. Landry called ATIC in Dayton, where he reached Ruppelt. Ruppelt told Landry that weather might have caused the radar targets, but there was no proof. He later learned that Truman was listening to the conversation.²⁹ Across the ocean, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to his Secretary of State for Air: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?”³⁰

On July 28, Blue Book received the astonishing total of fifty UFO reports in a single day. UFO inquiries were jamming the Pentagon’s telephone circuits. Even skeptical air force generals and CIA officials conceded there was a problem, if only because the Soviet Union might take advantage of the situation through some kind of psychological warfare or even by launching an attack.³¹

There is an uncorroborated claim that the air force shot down a UFO during the July crisis. The source is Canadian government official and UFO researcher Wilbert Smith. In an interview conducted almost ten years later, Smith claimed to have shown his friend, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral H. B. Knowles, “a piece which had been shot from a small flying saucer near Washinton in July [1952].” Smith told the interviewers:

I showed it to the admiral. It was a piece of metal about twice the size of your thumb which had been loaned to me for a very short time by your air force.... As a general thing they differ only in that they are much harder than our materials. [It was] in reality a matrix of magnesium orthosilicate. The matrix had great numbers—thousands—of 15-micron spheres scattered through it.

When asked if he returned the piece to the air force, Smith replied, “Not the air force. Much higher than that.” Was it the CIA? Smith chuckled and said, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I don’t care to go beyond that point. I can say to you that it went into the hands of a highly classified group. You will have to solve that problem, their identity, for yourselves.”³²

THE PRESS CONFERENCE

In Washington, D.C., at 4 P.M. on July 29, 1952, the air force held its largest and longest press conference since the end of WWII. Maj. Gen. John Samford, Director of Air Force Intelligence, led the press conference. He was accompanied by Gen. Roger Ramey, the man who five years earlier had ended speculation about the Roswell crash. Relying on Donald Menzel’s theory of temperature inversion, Samford explained the recent UFO sightings over Washington as caused by “weather phenomena.” The atmospheric condition caused the radar beams to bend and pick up objects on the ground.

Samford was no scientist, and would not answer many questions. His assistant, Capt. Roy James, a radar specialist from ATIC, provided more technical explanations. James actually knew little of the incidents and had arrived in Washington only that morning. Attending but silent were three men who had been in the Air Route Traffic Control radar room at Washington National Airport during the affair: Maj. Dewey J. Fournet, Jr., public relations officer Albert Chop, and Lieutenant Holcomb, a navy electronics expert assigned to the air force. These three rejected the temperature inversion explanation.

Despite the inversion theory, Samford acknowledged that

there have remained a percentage of this total [of all UFO reports received by the air force], about 20 percent of the reports, that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things. We keep on being concerned about them.... Our present course of action is to continue on this problem with the best of our ability, giving it the attention that we feel it very definitely warrants. We will give it adequate attention, but not frantic attention.