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When the word of the press conference regarding the Mantell Incident came down, a UFO expert was needed. The major, because of his short intelligence summary on UFO's, became the "expert." He had evidently conjured up "they" and "their later report" to support his Venus answer because the writers at the press conference had him in a corner. I looked farther.
Major Dewey Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who had been at the airport during the sightings, were extremely conspicuous by their absence, especially since it was common knowledge among the press that they weren't convinced the UFO's picked up on radars were weather targets. But somehow out of this chaotic situation came exactly the result that was intended the press got off our backs.
Why the intelligence officer didn't pass this information on to us I'll never know. The Montana Movie was rejected by the panel as positive proof because even though the two observers said that the jets were in another part of the sky when they saw the UFO's and our study backed them up, there was still a chance that the two UFO's could have been the two jets.
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 UFO's. The man was at the meeting at the personal request of a general officer. Every word of the two-hour meeting was recorded on a wire recorder.
The flight that he proposed would be an operational unit with six aircraft two would be on constant alert. The F-94C's, then the hottest operational jet we had, would be stripped of all combat gear to give them peak performance, and they would carry a special camera in the nose. The squadrons would be located at places in the United States where UFO's were most frequently seen.
No one would fly 600 miles off the coast without filing a flight plan; if he got into trouble or went down, the Coast Guard or Air Rescue Service would have no idea where to look. Kerry was given the same negative answer when he checked on surface shipping. The last possibility was that the UFO's were meteors, but several points in the pilots' story ruled these out.
The scope presentation of each radar has certain peculiarities and an operator gets used to seeing these. Occasionally, and for some unknown reason, these peculiarities suddenly change. For months a temperature inversion may cause 50 or 75 targets to appear on the radarscope. The operator has learned to recognize them and knows that they are caused by weather. They are not UFO's.
But overnight something changes and now this same temperature inversion causes only one or two targets. The operator isn't used to seeing this and the targets are now UFO's. Many times we'd stumble across the fact that after the first report of a UFO being tracked on radar the same identical type of target would be tracked again, many times.
When I told him about the UFO's all I received was a rather uninterested stare. When I said they were over the base he did me the courtesy of going out to look. He came running back in and hit the scramble button. Three minutes later two F-86's were headed UFOward. They soon disappeared but their vapor trails kept the tense crowd informed of their progress. And believe me there was tension.
These were all reports that came from military installations. In addition, we received possibly two hundred letters reporting UFO's, but we were so busy all we could do was file them for future reference. In May 1952 I'd been out to George AFB in California investigating a series of sightings and was on my way home. I remember the flight to Dayton because the weather was bad all the way.
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