It wasn’t much to go on.
Grinning, Bob lifted a couple of sheets off the desk and waved them at Dwight,
who immediately snatched them from him and started reading. The papers included a
copy of General Twining’s original official letter, dated September 23, 1947, to the
Commanding General of the Army Air Force; another letter from Major-General
L.C.Craigie, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Matériel Command, dated December
30, 1947, instructing the Commanding General of Wright-Patterson AFB to form a
project, to be codenamed Sign and classified 2A, for the serious evaluation of UFO
reports; and finally, a Memorandum for the Record from the Commanding General of
Wright-Patterson to Dwight, ordering him to set up the project forthwith from his
present office in Wright Field.
Reading the letters with increasing exhilaration, Dwight saw all the words he had
longed to hear from his superiors: ‘the phenomenon reported is something real... not
visionary or fictitious... appear to be disc-shaped... as large as aircraft... controlled
either manually, automatically or remotely... might be of foreign origin... possibly
nuclear... collect, collate, evaluate and distribute all information... of concern to
national security...’ These words had finally come from the very top to cast the UFOs
out of mythology and bring them into reality. Dwight was overwhelmed. ‘Here’s your coffee, Cap’n.’
Dwight looked up with a start. Thelma was smiling at him and holding out a cup of
coffee. When he took it, she gave the other cup to Bob, who was grinning wickedly at
him.
‘Feels pretty good, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Christ, where do we start?’
‘Let’s go through all the reports.’
‘All of them?’ Thelma asked in dismay.
‘Yes, Thelma,’ Dwight confirmed, glancing sideways at her as she sat on the edge
of her desk, hitching up her skirt to reveal her perfect knees, and looked despairingly
at the thick files piled up on it. ‘All of them.’ He turned back to Bob. ‘Now, at last,
the top brass will be taking an interest, so we better make sure we’re prepared.’ ‘By isolating the major sightings from all the others and trying to find some pattern
in them.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You’re the boss,’ Bob said.
The day passed so quickly, they hardly knew it was fading. While Thelma fed
them on a constant diet of black coffee and, at lunchtime, sandwiches from the PX,
Dwight and Bob went through most of the files of UFO reports, or technical
information sheets, whittling out the weakest cases, selecting the strongest, and then
exchanging those selected and going through them again. By 5.30pm Thelma was
suggesting that it was time to finish work. By 6.30pm she was complaining that she
didn’t get paid overtime. An hour later she was pouring them more coffee and
insisting that she was going to miss dinner. At 8.00pm she was finally allowed to
leave, waving at Dwight as she did so, but smiling more meaningfully at Bob. By
9.00pm Dwight and Bob were facing each other over a mountain of reports and
through a haze of cigarette smoke, summarising what it was they had to go with. ‘Okay,’ Bob said, puffing smoke from yet another cigarette, but now sipping
whisky instead of coffee, ‘the basic scenario is this... The UFO scare didn’t really
start last July. It appears to have started before it, during World War II...’ On December 13, 1944, Marshall Yarrow, then the Reuters special correspondent
to Supreme Headquarters in liberated Paris, syndicated an article stating that the
Germans had produced a secret device, thought to be an air defence weapon, which
resembled the glass balls used on Christmas trees. According to Yarrow, they were
coloured silver, seemed slightly transparent, and had been seen hanging in the air
over German territory, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. A second article by
another reporter, published in the New York Herald Tribune of January 2, 1945,
described the devices as ‘weird, mysterious “Foo fighter” balls’ that raced alongside
the wings of Beaufighters flying intruder missions over Germany. According to the
reports of Allied pilots, the ‘balls of fire’ would appear suddenly and accompany the
planes for miles. They seemed to be radio-controlled from the ground. ‘Either because of the famous line from the popular Smokey Stover comic strip,
“Where there’s foo, there’s fire”,’ Bob explained, reading from his notes, ‘or simply
because the French word for “fire” is feu, those eerie weapons soon became widely
known as “Foo fighters”.’
Official Foo fighter reports were submitted by pilots Henry Giblin and Walter
Cleary, who stated that on the night of September 27, 1944, they had been harassed in
the vicinity of Speyer by ‘an enormous burning light’ that was flying above their
aircraft at about 250 miles per hour; then by Lieutenant Edward Schluter, a fighterpilot of the US 415th Night-Fighter Squadron based at Dijon, France, who, on the night of November 23, 1944, was harassed over the Rhine by ‘ten small reddish balls of fire’ flying in formation at immense speed. Further sightings were made by
members of the same squadron on November 27, December 22 and December 24. ‘In a report published in the New York Times of January 2, 1945, US Air Force
Lieutenant, Donald Meiers, claimed that there were three kinds of Foo fighter: red
balls of fire that appeared off the aircraft’s wingtips, other balls of fire that flew in
front of them, and “lights that appear in the distance - like a Christmas tree in the air -
and flicker on and off.” Meiers also confirmed that the Foo fighters climbed,
descended or turned when the aircraft did so. The Foo fighters were witnessed both at
night and by day, yet even when pacing the Allied aircraft they didn’t show up on
radar screens.’
Allied intelligence was concerned enough about the reports to establish a classified
project in England, under the direction of Lieutenant General Massey, to examine
them. Massey was able to confirm that the Foo fighters were balls of fire that flew in
parallel formation with the Allied aircraft, often pacing them for great distances, at
speeds exceeding 300 miles an hour, frequently causing their engines to malfunction
by cutting in and out. While a few reports of crashing Allied aircraft suggest that Foo
fighters caused the crashes by making the aircraft’s engines cut out completely, most
reports indicate that this was unlikely: that the Foo fighters merely tailed the planes
and caused psychological harm, rather than physical damage. They also flew away
when fired upon.
‘But in the end, no official designation of the Foo fighters was given,’ Dwight said. ‘No,’ Bob confirmed. ‘Unable to solve the mystery, both the RAF and the US
Eighth Army Air Force concluded that they were the products of mass hallucination.
Subsequently, they did no more about them. In any event, sightings of the Foo
fighters tailed off and ceased completely a few weeks before the end of the war.’ ‘But the first post-war UFO flap came in 1946 with the appearance of so-called
“ghost rockets” over Scandinavia and western Europe: cigar-shaped, with flames
issuing from the tail, and mostly seen at night, often by airline pilots and radar
operatives.’
‘Which led to speculation that both the Soviets and the Americans, utilising the
men and material captured in the secret research plants of Nazi Germany, including
those at Peenemünde and Nordhausen, were developing advanced saucer-shaped
aircraft.’
‘That could have been possible,’ Dwight said. ‘Certainly, when World War Two
ended, the Germans had several radical types of new aircraft and guided missiles
under development. The majority of such projects were in their infancy, but they
were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of the objects
reported by UFO observers.’
‘Right,’ Bob said. ‘And it’s worth noting that whereas the mysterious Foo fighters
didn’t show up on radar, the ghost rockets certainly did - so they couldn’t be
classified as hoaxes, misidentifications or the products of mass hallucination.’ ‘The Soviets denied any knowledge of the rockets.’
‘Sure, they did. But US suspicions remained unabated while those things continued
to fly. They only faded away the following year.’
‘Then came the first known American sightings.’ Dwight said, glancing down at
the notes he had taken from his own research. ‘Pilot Richard Rankin’s sighting of ten
discs, about thirty to thirty-five feet in diameter, over Bakersfield, California, on June
14, 1947; the Maury Island sighting of six larger discs by Harold Dahl on June 21,
1947 over Puget Sound, off Tacoma, Washington; and three days later, Kenneth
Arnold’s famous sighting of nine disc-shaped, apparently metallic, objects flying in
formation and making an undulating motion, near Mount Rainier in the Cascades,
also in Washington. In the latter two cases the UFOs flew off and disappeared in the
direction of the Canadian border.’
‘Thus strengthening the belief that they could be American secret weapons, also
based on captured German designs.’
‘In other words, both the Soviets and the Americans could be producing secret
weapons, or aircraft, from designs and material captured during the war.’ ‘Which would lend credence to the reality of the original Foo fighter.’ ‘Right,’ Dwight said. ‘Then came last year's plague of UFO sightings over topsecret military bases.’ He glanced down at his notes again. ‘The first, on June 28, was
over Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. The next, on June 29, was
near Alamogordo, New Mexico, right over the White Sands Proving Ground. Finally,
on July 8, there was a whole spate of sightings of spherically shaped, white
aluminium-coloured objects flying over Muroc Air Base, the supersecret air force test
centre in the Mojave Desert.’
Bob nodded assent. ‘And because those particular sightings were made by trained
technicians and pilots, and as the reported objects were appearing increasingly over
top-and-supersecret military research bases, a growing suspicion in intelligence
circles was that the men and material deported from Nazi Germany to Russia had led
to a dangerous Soviet lead in space technology.’
‘Either them or extraterrestrials.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Bob said. ‘Little green men.’
‘Either way,’ Dwight summarised, ‘what we’re dealing with is a combination of
small, fiery, probably remote-controlled discs and large, aircraft-sized, obviously
piloted, so-called flying saucers.’
‘I guess so,’ Bob said.
Dwight sighed, put his feet up on the desk, then lit yet another cigarette. ‘It’s now
probably too late to investigate the Maury Island and Kenneth Arnold sightings, but I
certainly think we should re-examine the ones that took place over our own military
establishments, particularly those at Muroc Air Base.’
‘That may be easier said than done,’ Bob pointed out. ‘I reckon we’ll have to be
careful. I mean, even though we’ve now been given official sanction to go ahead with
Project Sign, I don’t think we should forget that a lot of the personnel involved in UFO sightings, either reporting them or investigating them, have got into hot water
with their superiors, often for no apparent good reason.’
‘Yeah,’ Dwight said thoughtfully. ‘That’s always baffled me. Given that UFOs
have been classified as a threat to national security, it’s strange how much resistance
there’s been to investigating them - particularly from our own intelligence services. I
mean, even that famous Socorro sighting of last year... Remember that?’ Bob nodded
that he did, but Dwight went on anyway, talking, really, to himself. ‘First the Roswell
Army Air Base public information officer, Lieutenant Walter Haunt, was
reprimanded and posted to some shit-hole for releasing the story to the press; then
First Lieutenant William Harris, the flight intelligence officer who helped me with
my investigations, went the same route. To that you can add the disturbing fact that
the major civilian witness to the actuality of the crashed saucer, local farmer Marlon
Clarke, has disappeared completely. Last but not least, the former, highly decorated,
OSS member and local UFO authority, Mike Bradley, refuses to even discuss the
matter, which suggests that he’s pretty frightened of something - or someone. So, yes,
I think we’ve good reason to be concerned.’
‘I don’t wanna sound paranoid,’ Bob said, pushing his chair back, placing his
hands on his hips and stretching his spine, ‘but we’ve already had two officers killed
under suspicious circumstances while involved in UFO investigations. Only four
months ago. August 1, 1947. Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank
Brown, both members of A-2 Military Intelligence of the Fourth Air Force. Engaged
in an investigation of Harold Dahl and the Maury Island mystery. They were flying
back to the Fourth Air Force, Hamilton Field, California, with a box containing the
malfunctioned and crashed, killing both of them. Even more surprising is that the
only other two passengers on board, Technician Fourth Grade Woodrow D.Mathews
and Master Sergeant Elmer L.Taff, neither experienced flyers, both of whom had,
reportedly, cadged a lift at the last moment, managed to parachute to safety while our
two highly trained intelligence officers failed to do so. That anomaly still hasn’t been
explained.’
‘You think it was rigged?’
Bob shrugged. ‘All I know is that two experienced intelligence officers died - and
the only physical evidence for flying saucers we’ve had so far was lost in that crash.’ Dwight shivered, feeling cold. He glanced out the window, saw that it was dark,
looked at his wristwatch and lowered his feet to the floor as if they'd been scorched.
‘Shit!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s thirty after nine already! I should have been home for
dinner three hours ago. Beth’s gonna kill me!’
‘The joys of marriage,’ Bob said, putting on his peaked cap and buttoning up his
jacket. ‘I think I’ll go and have a drink with a friend.’
‘I hope it’s not the delectable Thelma,’ Dwight said, pushing his chair back, getting
to his feet, and likewise preparing to leave. ‘A good officer doesn’t get involved with
his staff, no matter how much he’s tempted.’
‘I think I get the message, Dwight.’ Bob grinned and pa
tted Dwight on the
shoulder, then they turned out the lights and left the office, locking the door behind
them. Once outside, Dwight looked across at the huge hangars, parked planes and
silent airstrip of Wright Field, thinking of the other kinds of aircraft now haunting the
skies. Now, when he saw a shooting star, his heart gave a leap. It was almost
instinctive.
‘Project Sign,’ he said. ‘It sounds good. I think I’ll enjoy it.’
‘You will,’ Bob replied, ‘but Beth won’t. Good night and good luck, my friend.’ ‘Tread carefully,’ Dwight said.
They walked off in opposite directions, Bob to have a drink, probably with Thelma
Wheeler, no matter what Dwight said, and Dwight to return and face the music for
being late to dinner again. As he headed away from Wright Field, the silence was
broken by the deep rumble of an RB-29 coming in to land, reminding him that the air
base never slept. Glancing up at the sky, which was a mosaic of cloudy patches and
stars, he contemplated the possibility of equipping some RB-29s with the latest aerial
cameras and using them to photograph unusual phenomena by day and by night. The
Air Matériel Command laboratories at Wright Field, he was convinced, would be
ideal for the processing of such photos. Determined to put his idea into immediate
practice, he turned into the silent streets of the married officers’s quarters, then
entered his temporary home.
As anticipated, Beth was not amused. Dwight’s meal was sitting untouched on the
table. Beth was reading a book, smoking a cigarette, and listening to Arthur Godfrey
on the radio at the same time. She did not look up when Dwight entered. ‘Sorry,’ he said. When she didn't reply, he crossed the room and kissed the top of
her head. ‘Really, I’m sorry.’
‘Your dinner’s cold.’
‘I noticed.’
‘Nichola’s in bed.’
‘I guessed.’
‘I didn’t get my postcard,’ Beth said, ‘and you seemed to be gone that long.’ ‘Okay, Beth, that’s enough.’
‘Your work.’
‘Yes, my work. We have to set up this new project and we don’t have much time.’ ‘No time for us, obviously.’
‘That’s not an issue, Beth. I was only a ten-minute walk from here. It shouldn’t be
a big deal.’
Beth stubbed her cigarette out, closed her book, turned off the radio. Standing up,