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143 FOR TWO WEEKS after my return to Washington, General Sory Smith held off a final answer about my trip to Wright Field. Meantime, Ken Purdy had called him backing my request to see the Project files. It was obvious to me that Wright Field was determined not to open the files. But the General was trying to avoid making it official. "Why can't you accept my word there's nothing to the saucers?" he asked me one day. "You're impeaching my personal veracity." But finally he saw there was no other way out. He told me I had been officially refused permission to see the Wright Field files. Some time later, Ken Purdy phoned General Smith. "General, if the Air Force wants to talk to us off the record, we'll play ball. True will either handle it from then on whatever way you think best or we'll keep still." Meantime, saucer reports had begun to come in from all over the country. Some even came from abroad. Some of these 1950 sightings have already been mentioned in early chapters. Besides the strange affair at Tucson on February 1, there were several other cases in February. Three of these were in South America. One saucer was reported near the naval air station at Alameda, California. Some were sighted in Texas, New Mexico, ad a a a In March, the wave of sightings reached such a height that the Air Force again denied the saucers' existence. This followed a report that a flying disk had crashed near Mexico City and that the wreckage had been viewed by U. S. Air Force officials. Scores of Orangeburg, South Carolina, residents watched a disk that hovered over that city on March 10. It was described as silver-bright, turning slowly in the air before it disappeared. The day before this, residents {(p. 168) of Van Nuys, California, saw a bright disk moving swiftly four hundred feet in the air. Seen through a telescope, it appeared to be fifty feet in diameter. CHAPTER XIX Whether this offer was relayed higher up, I don't know. But nothing came of it. and other parts of the Southwest.