65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_007

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tronomers, whom J ' r"1 lled "our best
advisers ... in ••~ss of visitors
from elsewhere,
~
;aph the sky
continuously, but they had reported no
saucers. The General was reminded
that many of the people who had told of
seeing the most spectacular things were
considered the most reliable. He replied
that he had no intention of discrediting
them, but the fact remained that none
of them had offered data of the kind a
scientist would find useful. An Air
Force officer whom General Sam­
ford personally knew to be a com­
petent witness had told him of seeing
a saucer in the Middle East. This
man, too, had been unable to obtain ac­
curate measurements. "We have many
reports from credible observers of in­
credible things," the General remarked.
Like General Moore, his predecessor
in Project Saucer days, General Sam­
ford denied that the Air Force was at­
tempting to cover up secret experiments.
When he was asked if tl1e saucers might
be the guided missiles of a foreign coun­
try, he replied that he didn't see how, on
the basis of their weird performances,
they could be unless "someone" had
achieved a means of developing unlim­
ited power-"power of such fantastic
higher limits that it is a theoretical un­
limited; it's not anytl1ing that we can
understand"-and utilizing it under
conditions in which no mass is involved.
As for the latter, the General told the
press, drawing a laugh, " You know,
what 'no mass' means is that there's
nothing tl1ere."
W
HILE General Samford's inter­
view probably reassured the pub­
lic as evidence that the Air Force was
still on me job, it did nothing to lessen
the nation's saucer-consciousness. The
reporters had hardly rnanked the Gen­
eral for his comments when, on Au­
gust Ist, a Coast Guard photographer
produced a picrnre showing four bizarre
lights burning brilliantly in a daylight
sky. He said he had taken it over Salem,
Massachusetts. The next day, a Har­
vard astrophysicist called the photograph
worthless because it was accompanied by
no scientific data, such as temperature
distribution and altitude. On August
6th, an Army physicist at Fort Belvoir,
Virginia, creato6 the equivalent of flying
saucers in his laborat0ry by introducing
molecules of ionized air into a partial
vacuum in a bell jar, and three days
later an internationally known authori­
ty on atmospheric conditions said of the
physicist's experiment, "I know of no
conditions of the earth's atmosphere,
high or low, whi~h would duplicate,
. .
,
page 81, 82