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27 Two months later, on December 10, 1948, the USAF's Direc- torate of Intelligence issued a lengthy Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S. that remained Top Secret until 1985. It wee AL ee cae a tte t PAL 2 a ee Le te made no attempt to explain individual reports but strongly sug- gested that hypothetical Soviet developments based on captured Nazi German technology were responsible for flying saucer sightings. Singled out for particular attention were the experi- mental craft (mainly gliders) developed by the Horten brothers, despite the fact that they were characterized by very long, thin wooden wings and resembled almost no reported saucers. The view in some circles is that the report may be similar to the earlier Top Secret Estimate of the Situation that had been rejected, with the material about the extraterrestrial nature of the saucers replaced by that about Soviet/Nazi craft which would have been more palatable to the Air Force brass. All was assumed to be proper in the operation of Project Sign and its successor, Project Grudge, until late December 1949, when noted aviation writer and retired Marine Corps pilot Donald Keyhoe made a series of startling accusations in True magazine. He cited inside sources who led him to the conclu- sion that the flying saucers were alien spacecraft bent on ex- ploring Earth. A similar claim had been made earlier in an obscure occult magazine, but the Hue piece was read by hun- dreds of thousands and was then picked up by the wire services 1 4 se and made into front-page news. Neither before nor since has the U.S. government reacted so swiftly and definitively to a popular-magazine article challeng- ing its handling of the UFO problem. To counter Keyhoe's claims, the Department of Defense quickly announced: The Air Force has discontinued its special project investigating and evaluating reported "flying saucers" on the basis that there is no evidence the reports are not the result of natural phenomena. Discontinuance of the project, which was carried out by the Air Force, was concurred in the Departments of the Army and Navy. (In fact, the official investigation was not discontinued but merely deemphasized.) THE GOVERNMENT AND UFOS