This bit of reporting makes Major Keyhoe the greatest journalist in history.  This beats wire tapping.  He reads minds.  And not only that, he can read them right through the walls of the Pentagon.  But I’m glad that Keyhoe was able to read the General’s mind and that he wrote the true and accurate facts about what he was really thinking because I spent quite a bit of time talking to the General that day and he sure fooled me.  I had no idea he was worried about what he should tell the public.

When the press conference, which was the largest and longest the Air Force had held since World War II, convened at 4:00P.M., General Samford made an honest effort to straighten out the Washington National Sightings, but the cards were stacked against him before he started.  He had to hedge on many answers to questions from the press because he didn’t know the answers.  This hedging gave the impression that he was trying to cover up something more than just the fact that his people had fouled up in not fully investigating the sightings.  Then he had brought in Captain Roy James from ATIC to handle all the queries about radar.  James didn’t do any better because he’d just arrived in Washington that morning and didn’t know very much more about the sightings than he’d read in the papers.  Major Dewey Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who had been at the airport during the sightings, were extremely conspicuous by their absence, especially since it was common knowledge among the press that they weren’t convinced the UFO’s picked up on radars were weather targets.

But somehow out of this chaotic situation came exactly the result that was intended—­the press got off our backs.  Captain James’s answers about the possibility of the radar targets’ being caused by temperature inversions had been construed by the press to mean that this was the Air Force’s answer, even though today the twin sightings are still carried as unknowns.

The next morning headlines from Bangor to Bogota read: 

AIR FORCE DEBUNKS SAUCERS AS JUST NATURAL PHENOMENA

The Washington National Sightings proved one thing, something that many of us already knew:  in order to forestall any more trouble similar to what we’d just been through we always had to get all of the facts and not try to hide them.  A great deal of the press’s interest was caused by the Air Force’s reluctance to give out any information, and the reluctance on the part of the Air Force was caused by simply not having gone out to find the answers.

But had someone gone out and made a more thorough investigation a few big questions would have popped up and taken some of the intrigue out of the two reports.  It took me a year to put the question marks together because I just picked up the information as I happened to run across it, but it could have been collected in a day of concentrated effort.