About 10:00A.M. the President’s air aide, Brigadier General Landry, called intelligence at President Truman’s request to find out what was going on.  Somehow I got the call.  I told General Landry that the radar target could have been caused by weather but that we had no proof.

To add to the already confused situation, new UFO reports were coming in hourly.  We kept them quiet mainly because we weren’t able to investigate them right away, or even confirm the facts.  And we wanted to confirm the facts because some of the reports, even though they were from military sources, were difficult to believe.

Prior to the Washington sightings in only a very few of the many instances in which radar had picked up UFO targets had the targets themselves supposedly been seen visually.  Radar experts had continually pointed out this fact to us as an indication that maybe all of the radar targets were caused by freak weather conditions.  “If people had just seen a light, or an object, near where the radar showed the UFO target to be, you would have a lot more to worry about,” radar technicians had told me many times.

Now people were seeing the same targets that the radars were picking up, and not just at Washington.

On the same night as the second Washington sighting we had a really good report from California.  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.  For several minutes they played tag with the UFO.  Both the radar on the ground and the radar in the F-94 showed that as soon as the airplane would get almost within gunnery range of the UFO it would suddenly pull away at a terrific speed.  Then in a minute or two it would slow down enough to let the F-94 catch it again.

When I talked to the F-94 crew on the phone, the pilot said that they felt as if this were just a big aerial cat-and-mouse game—­and they didn’t like it—­at any moment they thought the cat might have pounced.

Needless to say, this was an unknown.

About midmorning on Tuesday, July 29th, Major General John Samford sent word down that he would hold a press conference that afternoon in an attempt to straighten out the UFO situation with the press.

Donald Keyhoe reports on the press conference and the events leading up to it in detail in his book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space.  He indicates that before the conference started, General Samford sat behind his big walnut desk in Room 3A138 in the Pentagon and battled with his conscience.  Should he tell the public “the real truth”—­that our skies are loaded with spaceships?  No, the public might panic.  The only answer would be to debunk the UFO’s.