An ex-Air Chief Marshal in the RAF, Lord Dowding, went to bat for the UFO’s.  The Netherlands Air Chief of Staff said they can’t be.  Herman Oberth, the father of the German rocket development, said that the UFO’s were definitely interplanetary vehicles.

In Belgium a senator put the screws on the Secretary of Defense—­he wanted an answer.  The Secretary of Defense questioned the idea that the saucers were “real” and said that the military wasn’t officially interested.  In France a member of parliament received a different answer—­the French military was interested.  The French General Staff had set up a committee to study UFO reports.

In Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, American Ambassador to Italy, said that she had seen a UFO and had no idea what it could be.

Halfway around the world, in Australia, the UFO’s were busy too.  At Canberra Airport the pilot of an RAAF Hawker Sea Fury and a ground radar station teamed up to get enough data to make an excellent radar-visual report.

In early 1955 the flap began to die down about as rapidly as it had flared up, but it had left its mark—­many more believers.  Even the highly respected British aviation magazine, Aeroplane, had something to say.  One of the editors took a long, hard look at the over-all UFO picture and concluded, “Really, old chaps—­I don’t know.”

Probably the most unique part of the whole European Flap was the fact that the Iron Curtain countries were having their own private flap.  The first indications came in October 1954, when Rumanian newspapers blamed the United States for launching a drive to induce a “flying saucer psychosis” in their country.  The next month the Hungarian Government hauled an “expert” up in front of the microphone so that he could explain to the populace that UFO’s don’t really exist because, “all ‘flying saucer’ reports originate in the bourgeois countries, where they are invented by the capitalist warmongers with a view to drawing the people’s attention away from their economic difficulties.”

Next the U.S.S.R. itself took up the cry along the same lines when the voice of the Soviet Army, the newspaper Red Star, denounced the UFO’s as, you guessed it, capitalist propaganda.

In 1955 the UFO’s were still there because the day before the all-important May Day celebration, a day when the Soviet radio and TV are normally crammed with programs plugging the glory of Mother Russia to get the peasants in the mood for the next day, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had to get on the air to calm the people’s fears.  He left out Wall Street and Dulles this time—­UFO’s just don’t exist.

It was interesting to note that during the whole Iron Curtain Flap, not one sighting or complimentary comment about the UFO’s was made over the radio or in the newspapers; yet the flap continued.  The reports were obviously being passed on by word of mouth.  This fact seems to negate the theory that if the newspaper reporters and newscasters would give up the UFO’s would go away.  The people in Russia were obviously seeing something.