Page Content (OCR)
21 Few people thought the flying discs might be anything truly new and different. Rather, they were seen as a mixture of mistakes and sensationalism. And if strange craft of unknown origins and purposes were not flying over America, why pay any attention to a quickly denied claim that one had crashed? Something that doesn't exist can't very well crash, can it? It would be almost half an average lifetime before more than a few people began to think much about UFOs being fallible. Publicly, it looked like the flying saucers had flown back to nowhere at the end of the 1947 wave of sightings. No one in a position of authority—government officials, scientists, re- spected newsmen—had suggested that there might be any- thing more to them than a brief, particularly frivolous fad. It had been a lot of fun and now it was over ... except for those who had seen things they could not explain. Ted Bloecher's landmark study of the newspaper coverage of the 1947 flying saucer furor showed that almost a thousand reports of strange sights had been made to someone. In addition, there may have been several times that many people who had seen odd flying things but not mentioned them out of fear of ridicule. But that still totals no more than a few thousand people who had their own personal reasons for believing that the flying saucers were anything more than imagination fueled by excitement. Completely unknown to the American people was the very serious interest being shown in the flying saucers by the U.S. Army Air Forces. Officially, the government continued to scoff at flying-saucer reports and their reporters, and it would be many years before any of this became public knowledge, for the whole matter was treated as a vital military secret. Even before the June—July 1947 sighting wave had run its course, the first of several official inquiries had been started. Its conclu- sion, had it been presented to the general public, would have created shock waves: "From detailed study of reports selected for their impression of veracity and reliability, several conclu- sions have been formed: This 'flying saucer’ situation is not at all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomena. Something is really flying around." (Emphasis added) THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS