This change in the operating policy of the UFO project was so pronounced that I, like so many other people, wondered if there was a hidden reason for the change.  Was it actually an attempt to go underground—­to make the project more secretive?  Was it an effort to cover up the fact that UFO’s were proven to be interplanetary and that this should be withheld from the public at all cost to prevent a mass panic?  The UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous “The War of the Worlds” broadcast.

This period of “mind changing” bothered me.  Here were people deciding that there was nothing to this UFO business right at a time when the reports seemed to be getting better.  From what I could see, if there was any mind changing to be done it should have been the other way, skeptics should have been changing to believers.

Maybe I was just playing the front man to a big cover-up.  I didn’t like it because if somebody up above me knew that UFO’s were really spacecraft, I could make a big fool out of myself if the truth came out.  I checked into this thoroughly.  I spent a lot of time talking to people who had worked on Project Grudge.

The anti-saucer faction was born because of an old psychological trait, people don’t like to be losers.  To be a loser makes one feel inferior and incompetent.  On September 23, 1947, when the chief of ATIC sent a letter to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces stating that UFO’s were real, intelligence committed themselves.  They had to prove it.  They tried for a year and a half with no success.  Officers on top began to get anxious and the press began to get anxious.  They wanted an answer.  Intelligence had tried one answer, the then Top Secret Estimate of the Situation that “proved” that UFO’s were real, but it was kicked back.  The people on the UFO project began to think maybe the brass didn’t consider them too sharp so they tried a new hypothesis:  UFO’s don’t exist.  In no time they found that this was easier to prove and it got recognition.  Before if an especially interesting UFO report came in and the Pentagon wanted an answer, all they’d get was an “It could be real but we can’t prove it.”  Now such a request got a quick, snappy “It was a balloon,” and feathers were stuck in caps from ATIC up to the Pentagon.  Everybody felt fine.

In early 1949 the term “new look” was well known.  The new look in women’s fashions was the lower hemlines, in automobiles it was longer lines.  In UFO circles the new look was cuss ’em.

The new look in UFO’s was officially acknowledged on February 11, 1949, when an order was written that changed the name of the UFO project from Project Sign to Project Grudge.  The order was supposedly written because the classified name, Project Sign, had been compromised.  This was always my official answer to any questions about the name change.  I’d go further and say that the names of the projects, first Sign, then Grudge, had no significance.  This wasn’t true, they did have significance, a lot of it.