From the small bits of correspondence and memos that were in the ATIC files, it was apparent that Project Grudge thought that the UFO was on its way out.  Any writers inquiring about UFO activity were referred to the debunking press release given out just after the Post article had been published.  There was no more to say.  Project Grudge thought they were winning the UFO battle; the writers thought that they were covering up a terrific news story—­the story that the Air Force knew what flying saucers were and weren’t telling.

By late fall 1949 the material for several UFO stories had been collected by writers who had been traveling all over the United States talking to people who had seen UFO’s.  By early winter the material had been worked up into UFO stories.  In December the presses began to roll. True magazine “scooped” the world with their story that UFO’s were from outer space.

The True article, entitled, “The Flying Saucers Are Real,” was written by Donald Keyhoe.  The article opened with a hard punch.  In the first paragraph Keyhoe concluded that after eight months of extensive research he had found evidence that the earth was being closely scrutinized by intelligent beings.  Their vehicles were the so-called flying saucers.  Then he proceeded to prove his point.  His argument was built around the three classics:  the Mantell, the Chiles-Whitted, and the Gorman incidents.  He took each sighting, detailed the “facts,” ripped the official Air Force conclusions to shreds, and presented his own analysis.  He threw in a varied assortment of technical facts that gave the article a distinct, authoritative flavor.  This, combined with the fact that True had the name for printing the truth, hit the reading public like an 8-inch howitzer.  Hours after it appeared in subscribers’ mailboxes and on the newsstands, radio and TV commentators and newspapers were giving it a big play.  UFO’s were back in business, to stay.  True was in business too.  It is rumored among magazine publishers that Don Keyhoe’s article in True was one of the most widely read and widely discussed magazine articles in history.

The Air Force had inadvertently helped Keyhoe—­in fact, they made his story a success.  He and several other writers had contacted the Air Force asking for information for their magazine articles.  But, knowing that the articles were pro-saucer, the writers were unceremoniously sloughed off.  Keyhoe carried his fight right to the top, to General Sory Smith, Director of the Office of Public Information, but still no dice—­the Air Force wasn’t divulging any more than they had already told.  Keyhoe construed this to mean tight security, the tightest type of security.  Keyhoe had one more approach, however.  He was an ex-Annapolis graduate, and among his classmates were such people as Admiral Delmar Fahrney, then a top figure in the Navy guided missile program and Admiral Calvin Bolster, the Director of the Office of Naval Research.  He went to see them but they couldn’t help him.  He knew that this meant the real UFO story was big and that it could be only one thing—­interplanetary spaceships or earthly weapons—­and his contacts denied they were earthly weapons.  He played this security angle in his True article and in a later book, and it gave the story the needed punch.