But the Air Force wasn’t trying to cover up.  It was just that they didn’t want Keyhoe or any other saucer fans in their hair.  They couldn’t be bothered.  They didn’t believe in flying saucers and couldn’t feature anybody else believing.  Believing, to the people in ATIC in 1949, meant even raising the possibility that there might be something to the reports.

The Air Force had a plan to counter the Keyhoe article, or any other story that might appear.  The plan originated at ATIC.  It called for a general officer to hold a short press conference, flash his stars, and speak the magic words “hoaxes, hallucinations, and the misidentification of known objects,” True, Keyhoe and the rest would go broke trying to peddle their magazines.  The True article did come out, the general spoke, the public laughed, and Keyhoe and True got rich.  Only the other magazines that had planned to run UFO stories, and that were scooped by True, lost out.  Their stories were killed—­they would have been an anti-climax to Keyhoe’s potboiler.

The Air Force’s short press conference was followed by a press release.  On December 27, 1949, it was announced that Project Grudge had been closed out and the final report on UFO’s would be released to the press in a few days.  When it was released it caused widespread interest because, supposedly, this was all that the Air Force knew about UFO’s.  Once again, instead of throwing large amounts of cold water on the UFO’s, it only caused more confusion.

The report was officially titled “Unidentified Flying Objects—­ Project Grudge,” Technical Report No. 102-AC-49/15-100.  But it was widely referred to as the Grudge Report.

The Grudge Report was a typical military report.  There was the body of the report, which contained the short discussion, conclusions, and recommendations.  Then there were several appendixes that were supposed to substantiate the conclusions and recommendations made in the report.

One of the appendixes was the final report of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Grudge’s contract astronomer.  Dr. Hynek and his staff had studied 237 of the best UFO reports.  They had spent several months analyzing each report.  By searching through astronomical journals and checking the location of various celestial bodies, they found that some UFO’s could be explained.  Of the 237 reports he and his staff examined, 32 per cent could be explained astronomically.

The Air Force Air Weather Service and the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory had sifted the reports for UFO’s that might have been balloons.  These two organizations had data on the flights of both the regular weather balloons and the huge, high-flying skyhooks.  They wrote off 12 per cent of the 237 UFO reports under study as balloons.

This left 56 per cent still unknown.  By weeding out the hoaxes, the reports that were too nebulous to evaluate, and reports that could well be misidentified airplanes, Project Grudge disposed of another 33 per cent of the reports.  This left 23 per cent that fell in the “unknown” category.