In addition, the weather observers from Long Beach said that during the period that the intercept was taking place they had gone outside and looked at their balloon; it was an exceptionally clear day and they could see it at unusually high altitudes.  They didn’t see any F-86’s around it.  And one stronger point, the balloon had burst about ten minutes before the F-86’s lost sight of the UFO.

Lieutenant Metscher took over and, riding on his Fort Monmouth victory, tried to show how the pilots had seen the balloon.  He got the same thing I did—­nothing.

On October 27, 1951, the new Project Grudge was officially established.  I’d written the necessary letters and had received the necessary endorsements.  I’d estimated, itemized, and justified direct costs and manpower.  I’d conferred, inferred, and referred, and now I had the money to operate.  The next step was to pile up all this paper work as an aerial barrier, let the saucers crash into it, and fall just outside the door.

I was given a very flexible operating policy for Project Grudge because no one knew the best way to track down UFO’s.  I had only one restriction and that was that I wouldn’t have my people spending time doing a lot of wild speculating.  Our job would be to analyze each and every UFO report and try to find what we believed to be an honest, unbiased answer.  If we could not identify the reported object as being a balloon, meteor, planet, or one of half a hundred other common things that are sometimes called UFO’s, we would mark the folder “Unknown” and file it in a special file.  At some later date, when we built up enough of these “Unknown” reports, we’d study them.

As long as I was chief of the UFO project, this was our basic rule.  If anyone became anti-flying saucer and was no longer capable of making an unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went.  Conversely anyone who became a believer was through.  We were too busy during the initial phases of the project to speculate as to whether the unknowns were spaceships, space monsters, Soviet weapons, or ethereal visions.

I had to let three people go for being too pro or too con.

By the latter part of November 1951 I knew most of what had taken place in prior UFO projects and what I expected to do.  The people in Project Sign and the old Project Grudge had made many mistakes.  I studied these mistakes and profited by them.  I could see that my predecessors had had a rough job.  Mine would be a little bit easier because of the pioneering they had done.

Lieutenant Metscher and I had sorted out all of the pre-1951 files, refiled them, studied them, and outlined the future course of the new Project Grudge.