Meanwhile, it seemed that the UFOs all flew away, at least compared with the year before. They didn’t, of course, and actually appeared more frequently than in many prior years, with the exception of 1952. Study of them continued, as well. In April, Canadian Wilbert Smith wrote to Keyhoe that Project Magnet’s report was “well along in the draft stages” and had concluded “the saucers are probably [original emphasis] alien vehicles, since there is no other explanation which fits the facts.” Smith doubted that his government would accept his recommendation to study the physics and technology of UFOs. He completed the classified report in August, writing, “We are forced to the conclusion that the vehicles are probably extraterrestrial. In spite of our prejudices to the contrary.” To his superiors at the Department of Transportation, Smith suggested setting up an electronic station to maintain a twenty-four-hour watch for UFOs, in order to learn anything possible about their technology. To Smith’s surprise, his request was approved, and a small station was set up in a DOT-owned hut at Shirley’s Bay, near Ottawa. Smith’s project received some press in November, but it appears that the participants worked on their own time, and that for the year of its operation, only one incident of note (on August 9, 1954) took place. On that date, the gravimeter at Shirley’s Bay indicated a greater deflection in the gravitational field than a passing aircraft or other conventional object would have caused. Smith was there at the time and rushed outside to see, but heavy clouds obstructed his view. The station was closed soon after, although this apparently had been planned some time earlier.4
One controversial incident involved a British airliner that crashed six minutes after takeoff from Calcutta on May 2. No one survived, and wreckage was scattered over a wide area. An investigator from the British Ministry of Civil Aviation announced that the plane had “collided with a fairly heavy body.” Witnesses saw no other planes when the airliner “seemed to stop short in midair.” UFO rumors persisted about the crash for over a year. On June 1, 1954, an official of the British Ministry of Civil Aviation told the London Daily Mail that any UFO connection to the crash was “utter balderdash.”5
On May 21, a UFO may have crashed near Kingman, Arizona. The account derives from Arthur G. Stancil, (known previously under the pseudonym Fritz Werner), an engineer affiliated with the Atomic Energy Commission and the air force who claimed to have worked on a retrieval of a crashed alien disc. Stancil claimed he was taken with other specialists in blacked-out buses to a desert site where he saw a thirty-foot-wide saucer embedded in the sand. He claimed to see a humanoid figure, apparently dead, three to four feet tall inside a guarded tent. Stancil produced diaries indicating he was on a special mission at the time. Researcher Leonard Stringfield also spoke with a naval intelligence officer who told him of alien bodies at Wright-Patterson AFB, allegedly from Kingman. To this day, many UFO researchers believe that a UFO may indeed have crashed at Kingman, but follow-up efforts have produced nothing definitive.6
Global sightings continued. The CIA reported an incident from May 18, 1953, in Iran, in which a very bright, large, and fast-moving object was seen for twenty minutes over oil areas in Khuzistan. On May 23, South African radar tracked a UFO near the Cape moving at 1,000 mph. On the twenty-sixth, according to CIA files, a UFO followed a man driving from Capetown to Uppington. On July 13, a CIA officer clipped the full text of an article in the Stockholm daily newspaper,
WHO WAS INVESTIGATING?
Gen. Charles Cabell became deputy director of the CIA on April 23, 1953. Cabell, it will be recalled, preceded Samford as Air Force Director of Intelligence, and had demanded better UFO reporting following the Fort Monmouth sighting of September 1951. Thus, the number two man at CIA was someone not only well versed in UFOs but personally interested in the subject.
Meanwhile, Blue Book was disabled as a UFO investigative body, and the 4602nd AISS slowly acquired more responsibility. By July, the 4602nd had taken over nearly all of Blue Book’s UFO field investigations.8 It appears that, rather than going through a single, unified military protocol, UFOs were being reported through various military channels to the offices deemed most appropriate. Observe how these three important UFO sightings of the summer were handled.
