. The two dead officers from Hamilton
AFB smelled a hoax, accounting for their short interview and
hesitancy in bothering to take the "fragments." They confirmed their
convictions when they talked to the intelligence officer at McChord.
It had already been established, through an informer, that the
fragments were what Brown and Davidson thought, slag. The classified
material on the B-25 was a file of reports the two officers offered
to take back to Hamilton and had nothing to do with the Maury Island
Mystery, or better, the Maury Island Hoax.

Simpson and his airline pilot friend weren't told about the hoax for
one reason. As soon as it was discovered that they had been "taken,"
thoroughly, and were not a party to the hoax, no one wanted to
embarrass them.

The majority of the writers of saucer lore have played this sighting
to the hilt, pointing out as their main premise the fact that the
story must be true because the government never openly exposed or
prosecuted either of the two hoaxers. This is a logical premise, but
a false one. The reason for the thorough investigation of the Maury
Island Hoax was that the government had thought seriously of
prosecuting the men. At the last minute it was decided, after talking
to the two men, that the hoax was a harmless joke that had
mushroomed, and that the loss of two lives and a B-25 could not be
directly blamed on the two men. The story wasn't even printed because
at the time of the incident, even though in this case the press knew
about it, the facts were classed as evidence. By the time the facts
were released they were yesterday's news. And nothing is deader than
yesterday's news.

As 1947 drew to a close, the Air Force's Project Sign had outgrown
its initial panic and had settled down to a routine operation. Every
intelligence report dealing with the Germans' World War II
aeronautical research had been studied to find out if the Russians
could have developed any of the late German designs into flying
saucers. Aerodynamicists at ATIC and at Wright Field's Aircraft
Laboratory computed the maximum performance that could be expected
from the German designs. The designers of the aircraft themselves
were contacted. "Could the Russians develop a flying saucer from
their designs?" The answer was, "No, there was no conceivable way any
aircraft could perform that would match the reported maneuvers of the
UFO's." The Air Force's Aeromedical Laboratory concurred. If the
aircraf