But after I knew the people at ATIC a little better, I found that being anti-saucer wasn’t a unanimous feeling.  Some of the intelligence officers took the UFO reports seriously.  One man, who had been on Project Sign since it was organized back in 1947, was convinced that the UFO’s were interplanetary spaceships.  He had questioned the people in the control tower at Godman AFB when Captain Mantell was killed chasing the UFO, and he had spent hours talking to the crew of the DC-3 that was buzzed near Montgomery, Alabama, by a “cigar-shaped UFO that spouted blue flame.”  In essence, he knew UFO history from A to Z because he had “been there.”

I think that it was this controversial thinking that first aroused my interest in the subject of UFO’s and led me to try to sound out a few more people.

The one thing that stood out to me, being unindoctrinated in the ways of UFO lore, was the schizophrenic approach so many people at ATIC took.  On the surface they sided with the belly-laughers on any saucer issue, but if you were alone with them and started to ridicule the subject, they defended it or at least took an active interest.  I learned this one day after I’d been at ATIC about a month.

A belated UFO report had come in from Africa.  One of my friends was reading it, so I asked him if I could take a look at it when he had finished.  In a few minutes he handed it to me.

When I finished with the report I tossed it back on my friend’s desk, with some comment about the whole world’s being nuts.  I got a reaction I didn’t expect; he wasn’t so sure the whole world was nuts—­ maybe the nuts were at ATIC.  “What’s the deal?” I asked him.  “Have they really thoroughly checked out every report and found that there’s nothing to any of them?”

He told me that he didn’t think so, he’d been at ATIC a long time.  He hadn’t ever worked on the UFO project, but he had seen many of their reports and knew what they were doing.  He just plain didn’t buy a lot of their explanations.  “And I’m not the only one who thinks this,” he added.

“Then why all of the big show of power against the UFO reports?” I remember asking him.

“The powers-that-be are anti-flying saucer,” he answered about half bitterly, “and to stay in favor it behooves one to follow suit.”

As of February 1951 this was the UFO project.

The words “flying saucer” didn’t come up again for a month or two.  I’d forgotten all about the two words and was deeply engrossed in making an analysis of the performance of the Mig-15.  The Mig had just begun to show up in Korea, and finding out more about it was a hot project.

Then the words “flying saucer” drifted across the room once more.  But this time instead of belly laughter there was a note of hysteria.

It seems that a writer from Life magazine was doing some research on UFO’s and rumor had it that Life was thinking about doing a feature article.  The writer had gone to the Office of Public Information in the Pentagon and had inquired about the current status of Project Grudge.  To accommodate the writer, the OPI had sent a wire out to ATIC:  What is the status of Project Grudge?