He shook his head. "I can"t believe those reports are right. It must have been sighted at different times."
I let it drop.
"What are you working on now?" Steele asked, after a minute or two.
I said I hadn"t decided. Actually, I planned a trip to the coast, to interview pilots who had sighted flying disks.
"What would you do if you found it wasn"t a Soviet missile?" said Steele. He sounded almost too casual.
"If security was involved, I"d keep still. But the Air Force and the Navy swear they haven"t any such things."
Steele looked at me thoughtfully.
"You know, True might force something into the open that would be better left secret." He smiled ironically. "I realize that sounds peculiar, since I suggested the Russian angle. But if it isn"t Russian--though I still think it is--then we have nothing to worry about."
I was almost sure now that he was a plant. During the rest of the luncheon, I tried to draw him out, but Steele was through talking.
When we parted, he gave me a sober warning.
"You and True should consider your moral responsibility, no matter what you find. Even if it"s not actual security, there may be reasons to keep still."
After he left me, I tried to figure it out. If the Air Force was back of this, they must not think much of my intelligence. Or else they had been in such a hurry to get a line on True"s investigation that they had no choice but
{p. 48}
to use Steele. Of course, it was still possible he was doing this on his own,
Either way, his purpose was obvious. He hoped to have us swallow the Soviet-missile answer. If we did, then we would have to keep still, even though we found absolute proof. Obviously, it would be dangerous to print that story.
Thinking back, I recalled Steele"s apparent attempt to dismiss the Mantell case. I was convinced now. The G.o.dman Field affair must hold an important clue that I had overlooked. It might even be the key to the whole flying saucer riddle.
{p. 49}
CHAPTER VI
SHORTLY after my talk with Steele, I flew to the Coast. For three weeks I investigated sightings that had been reported by airline and private pilots and other competent witnesses.
At first, the airline pilots were reluctant to talk. Most of them remembered the ridicule that had followed published accounts by other airline men. One pilot told me he had been ordered to keep still about his experience--whether by the company or the Air Force, he would not say. But most of them finally agreed to talk, if I kept their names out of print.
One airline captain--I"ll call him Blake--had encountered a saucer at night. He and his copilot had sighted the object, gleaming, in the moonlight, half a mile to their left.
"We were at about twelve thousand feet," he said, when we saw this thing pacing us. It didn"t have any running lights, but we could see the moonlight reflecting from something like bright metal. There was a glow along the side, like some kind of light, or exhaust."
"Could you make out the shape?" I asked.
Blake grinned crookedly. "You think we didn"t try? I cut in toward it.
It turned in the same direction. I pulled up about three hundred feet, and it did the same. Finally, I opened my throttles and cut in fast, intending to pull tip if we got too close. I needn"t have worried. The thing let out a burst of reddish flame and streaked up out of sight.
It was gone in a few seconds."
"Then it must have been piloted," I said.
"If not, it had some kind of radar-responder unit to make it veer off when anything got near it. It matched every move I made, until the last one."
I asked him what he thought the saucer was. Blake hesitated, then he gave me a slow grin.
"Well, my copilot thinks it was a s.p.a.ce ship. He says no pilot here on earth could take that many G"s, when the thing zoomed."
{p. 50}
I"d heard some "men from Mars" opinions about the saucers, but this was an experienced pilot.
"You don"t believe that?" I said.
"No," Blake said. "I figure it was some new type of guided missile. If it took as many G"s as Chuck, my copilot, thinks, then it must have been on a beam and remote-controlled."
Later, I found two other pilots who had the same idea as Chuck. One captain was afraid the flying saucers were Russian; his copilot thought they were Air Force or Navy. I met one airline official who was indignant about testing such missiles near the airways.
"Even if they do have some device to make them veer off," he said, "I think it"s a risk. There"ll be h.e.l.l to pay if one ever hits an airliner."
"They"ve been flying around for two years," a line pilot pointed out.
"n.o.body"s had a close call yet. I don"t think there"s much danger."
When I left the Coast, I flew to New York. Ken Purdy called in John DuBarry, True"s aviation editor, to hear the details. Purdy called him "John the Skeptic." After I told them what I had learned Purdy nodded.
"What do you think the saucers are?" asked DuBarry.
"They must be guided missiles," I said, "but it leaves some queer gaps in the picture."
I had made up a list of possible answers, and I read it to them:
"One, the saucers don"t exist. They"re caused by mistakes, hysteria, and so on. Two, they"re Russian guided missiles. Three, they"re American guided missiles. Four, the whole thing is a hoax, a psychological-warfare trick."
"You mean a trick of ours?" said Purdy.
"Sure, to make the Soviets think we could reach them with a guided missile. But I don"t think that"s the answer--I just listed it as a possibility."
DuBarry considered this thoughtfully.
"In the first place, you"d have to bring thousands of people into the scheme, so the disks would be reported often enough to get publicity.
You"d have to have some kind of device, maybe something launched from highflying bombers, to give the rumors substance. They"d
{p. 51}
certainly do a better job than this, to put it over. And it wouldn"t explain the world-wide sightings. Also, Captain Mantell wouldn"t kill himself just to carry out an official hoax."
"John"s right," said Purdy. "Anyway, it"s too ponderous. It would leak like a sieve, and the dumbest Soviet agent would see through it."
He looked back at my list. "Cross off Number One, There"s too much competent testimony, beside the obvious fact that something"s being covered up."