Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/56

 be done in a week.” The press respected this and was giving them time. But every writer worth his salt has contacts, those “usually reliable sources” you read about, and these contacts were talking. AU during 1948 contacts in the Pentagon were telling how UFO reports were rolling in at the rate of several per day and how ATIC UFO investigation teams were flying out of Dayton to investigate them. They were telling how another Air Force investigative organization had been called in to lighten ATIC’s load and allow ATIC to concentrate on the analysis of the reports. The writers knew this was true because they had crossed paths with these men whom they had mistakenly identified as FBI agents. The FBI was never officially interested in UFO sightings. The writers’ contacts in the airline industry told about the UFO talk from V.P.’s down to the ramp boys. Dozens of good, solid, reliable, experienced airline pilots were seeing UFO’s. All of this led to one conclusion: whatever the Air Force had to say, when it was ready to talk, would be newsworthy. But the Air Force wasn’t ready to talk.

Project Sign personnel were just getting settled down to work after the New Year’s holiday when the “ghost rockets” came back to the Scandinavian countries of Europe. Air attaches in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway fired wires to ATIC telling about the reports. Wires went back asking for more information.

The “ghost rockets,” so tagged by the newspapers, had first been seen in the summer of 1946, a year before the first UFO sighting in the U.S. There were many different descriptions for the reported objects. They were usually seen in the hours of darkness and almost always traveling at extremely high speeds. They were shaped like a ball or projectile, were a bright green, white, red, or yellow and sometimes made sounds. Like their American cousins, they were always so far away that no details could be seen. For no good reason, other than speculation and circulation, the newspapers had soon begun to refer authoritatively to these “ghost rockets” as guided missiles, and implied that they were from Russia. Peenemünde, the great German missile development center and birthplace of the V-l and V-2 guided missiles, came in for its share of suspicion since it was held by the Russians. By the end of the summer of 1946 the reports were widespread, coming from Denmark, Norway, Spain, Greece,