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None of them were believers in flying saucers, but they recognized the fact that UFO reports were a problem that must be considered. With technological progress what it is today, you can't afford to have anything in the air that you can't identify, be it balloons, meteors, planets or flying saucers. The plan that ADC agreed to was very simple.
Sooner or later, usually sooner, he heard about every UFO sighting in Hamilton County. He was given a code, "Foxtrot Kilo 3-0 Blue," which provided him with an open telephone line to the ADC Filter Center in Columbus. He was in business but he didn't have to build up a clientele it was there.
It also points up the fact that our investigation and analysis were thorough and that when we finally stamped a report "Unknown" it was unknown. We weren't infallible but we didn't often let a clue slip by. At exactly ten forty-five on the morning of August 1, 1952, an ADC radar near Bellefontaine, Ohio, picked up a high-speed unidentified target moving southwest, just north of Dayton.
I briefed General Benjamin W. Chidlaw, then the Commanding General of the Air Defense Command, and his staff, telling them about our plan. They agreed with it in principle and suggested that I work out the details with the Director of Intelligence for ADC, Brigadier General W. M. Burgess.
An ADC radar had picked up an unidentified target and an F-94C had been scrambled. The radar vectored the jet interceptor into the target, the radar operator in the '94 locked-on to it, and as the airplane closed in the pilot and RO saw that they were headed directly toward a large, yellowish- orange light.
The Air Defense Command UFO directive did not mention shooting at a UFO. This question came up during our planning meeting at Colorado Springs, but, like the authority to scramble, the authority to shoot at anything in the air had been established long ago. Every ADC pilot knows the rules for engagement, the rules that tell him when he can shoot the loaded guns that he always carries.
Or maybe they joined ranks with the airline pilot who told me that if a flying saucer flew wing tip to wing tip formation with him, he'd never tell the Air Force. In early February I made another trip to Air Defense Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs. This time it was to present a definite plan of how ADC could assist ATIC in getting better data on UFO's.
In a few days I again left ATIC, this time for Air Defense Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I wanted to find out how willing ADC was to help us and what they could do. When I arrived I got a thorough briefing on the operations of ADC and the promise that they would do anything they could to help solve the UFO riddle.
I was eating lunch in the officers' club when I saw an officer from the radar operations section at ADC. He asked me to stop by his office when I had a spare minute, and I said that I would. He said that it was important. It was the middle of the afternoon before I saw him and found out what he wanted. He had been in Alaska on TDY when the UFO had been picked up at the outpost radar site.
What these people saw is a mystery to this day. Late in September I made a trip out to Headquarters, ADC to brief General Chidlaw and his staff on the past few months' UFO activity. Our plans for periodic briefings, which we had originally set up with ADC, had suffered a bit in the summer because we were all busy elsewhere.
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