one sighting team spotted
a UFO the radio operator would call out his team's location, the
location of the UFO in the sky, and the direction it was going. All
of the other teams from his patrol would thus know when to look for
the UFO and begin to sight on it. While the radio man was reporting,
the instrument man on the team would line up the UFO and begin to
call out the angles of elevation and azimuth. The timer would call
out the time; the recorder would write all of this down. The command
post, upon hearing the report of the UFO, would call the next patrol
and tell them. They too would try to pick it up.

Here was an excellent opportunity to get some concrete data on at
least one type of UFO. It was something that should have been done
from the start. Speeds, altitudes, and sizes that are estimated just
by looking at a UFO are miserably inaccurate. But if you could
accurately establish that some type of object was traveling 30,000
miles an hour--or even 3,000 miles an hour--through our atmosphere,
the UFO story would be the biggest story since the Creation.

The plan seemed foolproof and had the full support of every man who
was to participate. For the first time in history every GI wanted to
get on the patrols. The plan was quickly written up as a field order,
approved, and mimeographed. Since the Air Force had the prime
responsibility for the UFO investigation, it was decided that the
plan should be quickly co-ordinated with the Air Force, so a copy was
rushed to them. Time was critical because every group of nightly
reports might be the last. Everything was ready to roll the minute
the Air Force said "Go."

The Air Force didn't O.K. the plan. I don't know where the plan was
killed, or who killed it, but it was killed. Its death caused two
reactions.

Many people thought that the plan was killed so that too many people
wouldn't find out the truth about UFO's. Others thought somebody was
just plain stupid. Neither was true. The answer was simply that the
official attitude toward UFO's had drastically changed in the past
few months. They didn't exist, they couldn't exist. It was the belief
at ATIC that the one last mystery, the green fireballs, had been
solved a few days before at Los Alamos. The fireballs were meteors
and Project Twinkle would prove it. Any further investigation by the
Army would be a waste of time and effort.

This drastic change in official attitude is as difficult to explain
as it was di