re responsible people. Somehow these facts and the
tone of the _Post_ article didn't quite jibe, and when things don't
jibe, people get suspicious.

In those people who had a good idea of what was going on behind
ATIC's barbed wire, the newspaper reporters and writers with the
"usually reliable sources," the _Post_ article planted a bigger seed
of doubt. Why the sudden change in policy they wondered? If UFO's
were so serious a few months ago, why the sudden debunking? Maybe
Shallet's story was a put-up job for the Air Force. Maybe the
security had been tightened. Their sources of information were
reporting that many people in the military did not quite buy the
Shallet article. The seed of doubt began to grow, and some of these
writers began to start "independent investigations" to get the "true"
story. Research takes time, so during the summer and fall of 1949
there wasn't much apparent UFO activity.

As the writers began to poke around for their own facts, Project
Grudge lapsed more and more into a period of almost complete
inactivity. Good UFO reports continued to come in at the rate of
about ten per month but they weren't being verified or investigated.
Most of them were being discarded. There are few, if any, UFO reports
for the middle and latter part of 1949 in the ATIC files. Only the
logbook, showing incoming reports, gives any idea of the activity of
this period. The meager effort that was being made was going into a
report that evaluated old UFO reports, those received prior to the
spring of 1949. Project Grudge _thought_ that they were writing a
final report on the UFO's.

From the small bits of correspondence and memos that were in the
ATIC files, it was apparent that Project Grudge thought that the UFO
was on its way out. Any writers inquiring about UFO activity were
referred to the debunking press release given out just after the
_Post_ article had been published. There was no more to say. Project
Grudge thought they were winning the UFO battle; the writers thought
that they were covering up a terrific news story--the story that the
Air Force knew what flying saucers were and weren't telling.

By late fall 1949 the material for several UFO stories had been
collected by writers who had been traveling all over the United
States talking to people who had seen UFO's. By early winter the
material had been worked up into UFO stories. In December the presses
began to roll. _True_ magazine "scooped" the world