were then known, for several weeks but I kept them in mind and one day I asked one of the old hands at ATIC about them—specifically I wanted to know about the Sioux City Incident. Why had it been sloughed off so lightly? His answer was typical of the official policy at that time. “One of these days all of these crazy pilots will kill themselves, the crazy people on the ground will be locked up, and there won’t be any more flying saucer reports.”
But after I knew the people at ATIC a little better, I found that being anti-saucer wasn’t a unanimous feeling. Some of the intelligence officers took the UFO reports seriously. One man, who had been on Project Sign since it was organized back in 1947, was convinced that the UFO’s were interplanetary spaceships. He had questioned the people in the control tower at Godman AFB when Captain Mantell was killed chasing the UFO, and he had spent hours talking to the crew of the DC-3 that was buzzed near Montgomery, Alabama, by a “cigar-shaped UFO that spouted blue flame.” In essence, he knew UFO history from A to Z because he had “been there.”
I think that it was this controversial thinking that first aroused my interest in the subject of UFO’s and led me to try to sound out a few more people.
The one thing that stood out to me, being unindoctrinated in the ways of UFO lore, was the schizophrenic approach so many people at ATIC took. On the surface they sided with the belly-laughers on any saucer issue, but if you were alone with them and started to ridicule the subject, they defended it or at least took an active interest. I learned this one day after I’d been at ATIC about a month.
A belated UFO report had come in from Africa. One of my friends was reading it, so I asked him if I could take a look at it when he had finished. In a few minutes he handed it to me. When I finished with the report I tossed it back on my friend’s desk, with some comment about the whole world’s being nuts. I got a reaction I didn’t expect; he wasn’t so sure the whole world was nuts—maybe the nuts were at ATIC. “What’s the deal?” I asked him. “Have they really thoroughly checked out every report and found that there’s nothing to any of them?” He told me that he didn’t think so, he’d been at ATIC a long time. He hadn’t ever worked on the UFO project, but he had seen
