A few hoaxes and crackpot reports rounded out Mr. Shallet’s article.

The reaction to the article wasn’t what the Air Force and ATIC expected.  They had thought that the public would read the article and toss it, and all thoughts of UFO’s, into the trash can.  But they didn’t.  Within a few days the frequency of UFO reports hit an all-time high.  People, both military and civilian, evidently didn’t much care what Generals Vandenberg, Norstad, Le May, or Colonel McCoy thought; they didn’t believe what they were seeing were hallucinations, reflections, or balloons.  What they were seeing were UFO’s, whatever UFO’s might be.

I heard many times from ex-Project Grudge people that Shallet had “crossed” them, he’d vaguely mentioned that there might be a case for the UFO.  This made him pro-saucer.

A few days after the last installment of the Post article the Air Force gave out a long and detailed press release completely debunking UFO’s, but this had no effect.  It only seemed to add to the confusion.

The one thing that Shallet’s article accomplished was to plant a seed of doubt in many people’s minds.  Was the Air Force telling the truth about UFO’s?  The public and a large percentage of the military didn’t know what was going on behind ATIC’s barbed-wire fence but they did know that a lot of reliable people had seen UFO’s.  Airline pilots are considered responsible people—­airline pilots had seen UFO’s.  Experienced military pilots and ground officers are responsible people—­they’d seen UFO’s.  Scientists, doctors, lawyers, merchants, and plain old Joe Doakes had seen UFO’s, and their friends knew that they were responsible people.  Somehow these facts and the tone of the Post article didn’t quite jibe, and when things don’t jibe, people get suspicious.

In those people who had a good idea of what was going on behind ATIC’s barbed wire, the newspaper reporters and writers with the “usually reliable sources,” the Post article planted a bigger seed of doubt.  Why the sudden change in policy they wondered?  If UFO’s were so serious a few months ago, why the sudden debunking?  Maybe Shallet’s story was a put-up job for the Air Force.  Maybe the security had been tightened.  Their sources of information were reporting that many people in the military did not quite buy the Shallet article.  The seed of doubt began to grow, and some of these writers began to start “independent investigations” to get the “true” story.  Research takes time, so during the summer and fall of 1949 there wasn’t much apparent UFO activity.

As the writers began to poke around for their own facts, Project Grudge lapsed more and more into a period of almost complete inactivity.  Good UFO reports continued to come in at the rate of about ten per month but they weren’t being verified or investigated.  Most of them were being discarded.  There are few, if any, UFO reports for the middle and latter part of 1949 in the ATIC files.  Only the logbook, showing incoming reports, gives any idea of the activity of this period.  The meager effort that was being made was going into a report that evaluated old UFO reports, those received prior to the spring of 1949.  Project Grudge thought that they were writing a final report on the UFO’s.