New Project Grudge

While I was in Lubbock, Lieutenant Henry Metscher, who was helping
me on Project Grudge, had been sorting out the many bits and pieces
of information that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel
Rosengarten had brought back from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and he
had the answers.

The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling
at a terrific speed because he couldn't lock on to it turned out to
be a 400-mile-an-hour conventional airplane. He'd just gotten fouled
up on his procedures for putting the radar set on automatic tracking.
The sighting by the two officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when
Metscher showed how they'd seen a balloon.

The second radar sighting of the series also turned out to be a
balloon. The frantic phone call from headquarters requesting a
reading on the object's altitude was to settle a bet. Some officers
in headquarters had seen the balloon launched and were betting on how
high it was.

The second day's radar sightings were caused by another balloon and
weather--both enhanced by the firm conviction that there were some
mighty queer goings on over Jersey.

The success with the Fort Monmouth Incident had gone to our heads
and we were convinced that with a little diligent digging we'd be
knocking off saucers like an ace skeet-shooter. With all the
confidence in the world, I attacked the Long Beach Incident, which
I'd had to drop to go to Lubbock, Texas. But if saucers could laugh,
they were probably zipping through the stratosphere chuckling to
themselves, because there was no neat solution to this one.

In the original report of how the six F-86's chased the high-flying
UFO over Long Beach, the intelligence officer who made the report had
said that he'd checked all aircraft flights, therefore this wasn't
the answer.

The UFO could have been a balloon, so I sent a wire to the Air Force
weather detachment at the Long Beach Municipal Airport. I wanted the
track of any balloon that was in the air at 7:55A.M. on September 23,
1951. While I was waiting for the answers to my two wires, Lieutenant
Metscher and I began to sort out old UFO reports. It was a big job
because back in 1949, when the old Project Grudge had been disbanded,
the files had just been dumped into storage bins. Hank and I now had
four filing case drawers full of a heterogeneous mass of UFO reports,
letters, copies of letters, and memos.

But I didn't get to do much sorting bec