During the early spring of 1952 reports of radar sightings increased rapidly.  Most of them came from the Air Defense Command, but a few came from other agencies.  One day, soon after the Alaskan Incident, I got a telephone call from the chief of one of the sections of a civilian experimental radar laboratory in New York State.  The people in this lab were working on the development of the latest types of radar.  Several times recently, while testing radars, they had detected unidentified targets.  To quote my caller, “Some damn odd things are happening that are beginning to worry me.”  He went on to tell how the people in his lab had checked their radars, the weather, and everything else they could think of, but they could find absolutely nothing to account for the targets; they could only conclude that they were real.  I promised him that his information would get to the right people if he’d put it in a letter and send it to ATIC.  In about a week the letter arrived—­hand-carried by no less than a general.  The general, who was from Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, had been in New York at the radar laboratory, and he had heard about the UFO reports.  He had personally checked into them because he knew that the people at the lab were some of the sharpest radar engineers in the world.  When he found out that these people had already contacted us and had prepared a report for us, he offered to hand-carry it to Wright-Patterson.

I can’t divulge how high these targets were flying or how fast they were going because it would give an indication of the performance of our latest radar, which is classified Secret.  I can say, however, that they were flying mighty high and mighty fast.

I turned the letter over to ATIC’s electronics branch, and they promised to take immediate action.  They did, and really fouled it up.  The person who received the report in the electronics branch was one of the old veterans of Projects Sign and Grudge.  He knew all about UFO’s.  He got on the phone, called the radar lab, and told the chief (a man who possibly wrote all of the textbooks this person had used in college) all about how a weather inversion can cause false targets on weather.  He was gracious enough to tell the chief of the radar lab to call if he had any more “trouble.”

We never heard from them again.  Maybe they found out what their targets were.  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.  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.  General Burgess designated Major Verne Sadowski of his staff to be the ADC liaison officer with Project Grudge.