maneuver. In several cases, they have been able to evade Air Force
planes in night encounters."

Going over the cases, I realized that Purdy and his staff had dug up
at least fifty reports that had not appeared in the papers. (A few of
these proved incorrect, but a check with the Air Force case reports
released on December 30, 1949, showed that True's files contained all
the important items.) These cases included sightings at eleven Air
Force bases and fourteen American airports, reports from ships at sea,
and a score of encounters by airline and private pilots.

Witnesses included Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force officers;
state and city police; F.B.I. agents; weather observers, shipmasters,
astronomers, and thousands of good solid American citizens. I learned
later that many witnesses had been investigated by the F.B.I. to weed
out crackpot reports.

I ended up badly puzzled. The evidence was more impressive than I had
suspected. It was plain that many

{p. 29}

reports had been entirely suppressed, or at least kept out of the
papers. There was something ominous about it. No matter what the
answer, it was serious enough to be kept carefully hidden.

If it were a Soviet missile, I thought, God help us. They'd scooped up
a lot of Nazi scientists and war secrets. And the Germans had been far
ahead of us on guided missiles. But why would they give us a two-year
warning, testing the things openly over America? It didn't make sense.