Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/180

 that obviously was not an airplane. The directive merely pointed out to the controllers that it was within the scope of existing regulations to scramble on radar targets that were plotted as traveling too fast or too slow to be conventional airplanes. The decision to scramble fighters was still up to the individual controller, however, and scrambling on UFO’s would be a second or third priority.

The Air Defense Command UFO directive did not mention shooting at a UFO. This question came up during our planning meeting at Colorado Springs, but, like the authority to scramble, the authority to shoot at anything in the air had been established long ago. Every ADC pilot knows the rules for engagement, the rules that tell him when he can shoot the loaded guns that he always carries. If anything in the air over the United States commits any act that is covered by the rules for engagement, the pilot has the authority to open fire.

The third thing that ADC would do would be to integrate the Ground Observer Corps into the UFO reporting net. As a second priority, the GOC would report UFO’s—first priority would still be reporting aircraft.

Ever since the new Project Grudge had been organized, we hadn’t had to deal with any large-scale publicity about UFO’s. Occasionally someone would bring in a local item from some newspaper about a UFO sighting, but the sightings never rated more than an inch or two column space. But on February 19, 1952, the calm was broken by the story of how a huge ball of fire paced two B-29’s in Korea. The story didn’t start a rash of reports as the story of the first UFO sighting did in June 1947, but it was significant in that it started a slow build-up of publicity that was far to surpass anything in the past.

This Korean sighting also added to the growing official interest in Washington. Almost every day I was getting one or two telephone calls from some branch of the government, and I was going to Washington at least once every two weeks. I was beginning to spend as much time telling people what was going on as I was doing anything about it. The answer was to get somebody in the Directorate of Intelligence in the Pentagon to act as a liaison officer. I could keep this person informed and he could handle the “branch office” in Washington. Colonel Dunn