Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/229

 —and they didn’t like it—at any moment they thought the cat might have pounced.

Needless to say, this was an unknown.

About midmorning on Tuesday, July 29th, Major General John Samford sent word down that he would hold a press conference that afternoon in an attempt to straighten out the UFO situation with the press.

Donald Keyhoe reports on the press conference and the events leading up to it in detail in his book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space. He indicates that before the conference started, General Samford sat behind his big walnut desk in Room 3A138 in the Pentagon and battled with his conscience. Should he tell the public “the real truth”—that our skies are loaded with spaceships? No, the public might panic. The only answer would be to debunk the UFO’s.

This bit of reporting makes Major Keyhoe the greatest journalist in history. This beats wire tapping. He read minds. And not only that, he can read them right through the walls of the Pentagon. But I’m glad that Keyhoe was able to read the General’s mind and that he wrote the true and accurate facts about what he was really thinking because I spent quite a bit of time talking to the general that day and he sure fooled me. I had no idea he was worried about what he should tell the public.

When the press conference, which was the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II, convened at 4:00 p.m., General Samford made an honest effort to straighten out the Washington National Sightings, but the cards were stacked against him before he started. He had to hedge on many answers to questions from the press because he didn’t know the answers. This hedging gave the impression that he was trying to cover up something more than just the fact that his people had fouled up in not fully investigating the sightings. Then he had brought in Captain Roy James from ATIC to handle all the queries about radar. James didn’t do any better because he’d just arrived in Washington that morning and didn’t know very much more about the sightings than he’d read in the papers. Major Dewey Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who had been at the airport during the sightings, were extremely conspicuous by their absence, especially since it was common knowledge among the press that