Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/316

 at the over-all UFO picture and concluded, “Really, old chaps—I don’t know.

Probably the most unique part of the whole European Flap was the fact that the Iron Curtain countries were having their own private nap. The first indications came in October 1954, when Rumanian newspapers blamed the United States for launching a drive to induce a “flying saucer psychosis” in their country. The next month the Hungarian Government hauled an “expert” up in front of the microphone so that he could explain to the populace that UFO’s don’t really exist because, “all ‘flying saucer’ reports originate in the bourgeois countries, where they are invented by the capitalist warmongers with a view to drawing the people’s attention away from their economic difficulties.”

Next the U.S.S.R. itself took up the cry along the same lines when the voice of the Soviet Army, the newspaper Red Star, denounced the UFO’s as, you guessed it, capitalist propaganda.

In 1955 the UFO’s were still there because the day before the all-important May Day celebration, a day when the Soviet radio and TV are normally crammed with programs plugging the glory of Mother Russia to get the peasants in the mood for the next day, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences had to get on the air to calm the people’s fears. He left out Wall Street and Dulles this time—UFO’s just don’t exist.

It was interesting to note that during the whole Iron Curtain Flap, not one sighting or complimentary comment about the UFO’s was made over the radio or in the newspapers; yet the flap continued. The reports were obviously being passed on by word of mouth. This fact seems to negate the theory that if the newspaper reporters and newscasters would give up the UFO’s would go away. The people in Russia were obviously seeing something.

While the European Flap was in progress, the UFO’s weren’t entirely neglecting the United States. The number of reports that were coming into Project Blue Book were below average, but there were reports. Many of them would definitely be classed as good, but the best was a report from a photo reconnaissance B-29 crew that encountered a UFO almost over Dayton.

About 11:00 on May 24, 1954, an RB-29 equipped with some new aerial cameras took off from Wright Field, one of the