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conclusion that we were dealing with extraterrestrial interlopers who were observing us from UFOs. But General Vandenberg, in the words of one of the officers | later ran into at the Pentagon, "had a cow, and not a mutilated one." "Colonel, " this officer said, "steam was coming out of the old man's ears he was so furious. Just be glad you weren't there. " So | asked this officer why General Vandenberg was so steamed. After all, he ordered the report in the first place. Why didn't he just agree with General Twining and Admiral Hillenkoetter to ask the President to begin releasing the information? "Are you crazy?" this officer said. The year was 1956 and | had been sent over from the White House for a briefing at the Pentagon. "Don't you remember what happened when that Orson Welles 'War of the Worlds’ broadcast was on the radio? We had near riots in the cities because they thought that thing was real. Can you imagine what would happen if it really happened? If our own government said that flying saucers had landed just like on the radio, only this time we caught one and they're still coming back? Think about it. Riots, looting, people going insane because they thought aliens were destroying the planet. " But the grumblings about the absence of government policy concerning UFO reports continued. Project "Grudge" listed and evaluated 244 UFO sightings. Then in 1949 a memo that came out of the CIA's Office of Scientific Investigation was very apprehensive about unexplained sightings of flying objects. Then in 1952 another CIA memo came to light; from the head of the Office of Scientific Investigations Weapons and Equipment Division it also complained about our lack of knowledge and police in the area of UFO sightings. Now even the CIA, it seemed, was at odds with itself at its various levels of bureaucracy over what to do about UFOs. Generals Twining. and Vandenberg had had enough. In 1952, the air force formally initiated Project Blue Book. At least if we weren't going to do anything about UFOs publicly, we had to have a way to salve the public's fear about UFO sightings. Blue Book was that salve. On January 14, 1953, just before the inauguration of President Eisenhower, CIA officials and air force officers met at the Pentagon at the CIA's invitation to discuss the UFO situation and what our working group had learned up to that point. Officiated at first by Dr. H. P. Robertson, a CIA employee and the director of the Weapons 112 He was right. And what was worse, the aliens were setting up for some sort of hostile act, whatever it was. When General Vandenberg read the "Estimate of the Situation, " he fumed and ordered the whole report burned to ashes before anyone else could read it. It was one of the last official government assessments of the UFO situation ever to get even close to being distributed before the real cover-up clamped down. Whatever the working group was supposed to be doing in 1952, it wasn't satisfying the National Security Council, which ordered the CIA to determine whether the existence of UFOs would create a danger for the United States. Of course, the CIA already knew, because two of its intelligence directors had been members of the . working group, that UFOs were displaying hostile intentions not | only to the United States but to the Soviets, the Italians, and the Scandinavians as well. All of NATO was trying to figure out a response to the UFO threat without triggering a reaction from the Soviets. That was one of the reasons, thirty years later, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev could come to a meeting of the minds about UFOs that ultimately brought an end to the need for a Cold War.