Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/95

 sightings and we couldn’t convince them they were wrong.”

Before long, however, the right man came along. He was Sidney Shallet, a writer for The Saturday Evening Post. He seemed to have the prerequisites that were desired, so his visit to ATIC was cleared through the Pentagon. Harry Haberer, a crack Air Force public relations man, was assigned the job of seeing that Shallet got his story. I have heard many times, from both military personnel and civilians, that the Air Force told Shallet exactly what to say in his article—play down the UFO’s—don’t write anything that even hints that there might be something foreign in our skies. I don’t believe that this is the case. I think that he just wrote the UFO story as it was told to him, told to him by Project Grudge.

Shallet’s article, which appeared in two parts in the April 30 and May 7, 1949, issues of The Saturday Evening Post, is important in the history of the UFO and in understanding the UFO problem because it had considerable effect on public opinion. Many people had, with varying degrees of interest, been wondering about the UFO’s for over a year and a half. Very few had any definite opinions one way or the other. The feeling seemed to be that the Air Force is working on the problem and when they get the answer we’ll know. There had been a few brief, ambiguous press releases from the Air Force but these meant nothing. Consequently when Shallet’s article appeared in the Post it was widely read. It contained facts, and the facts had come from Air Force Intelligence. This was the Air Force officially reporting on UFO’s for the first time.

The article was typical of the many flying saucer stories that were to follow in the later years of UFO history, all written from material obtained from the Air Force. Shallet’s article casually admitted that a few UFO sightings couldn’t be explained, but the reader didn’t have much chance to think about this fact because 99 per cent of the story was devoted to the anti-saucer side of the problem. It was the typical negative approach. I know that the negative approach is typical of the way that material is handed out by the Air Force because I was continually being told to “tell them about the sighting reports we’ve solved—don’t mention the unknowns.” I was never ordered to tell this, but it was