Message #136845

[Ramona Hanneken]

hinted at the balloon answer. In the Appendix, there was a brief comment: "Note that standard 30 inch and 65 inch weather balloons have vertical speeds of 600 and 1100 feet per minute, respectively."

In all the reports I have mentioned, and on through both the case books, one thing was immediately obvious. All the testimony, all the actual evidence was missing. These were only the declared conclusions of Project "Saucer." Whether they matched the actual conclusions in Wright Field secret files there was no way of knowing.

But even in these sketch reports, I found some odd hints, clues to what Project officials might really be thinking.

After an analysis of two Indianapolis cases, one investigator reports:

"Barring hallucination, these two incidents and 17, 75 and 84 seem the most tangible from the standpoint of description, of all those reported, and the most difficult to explain away as sheer nonsense."

Case 17, I found, was that of Kenneth Arnold. But in spite of the above admission that this case cannot be explained away, it is officially listed as answered.

Case 75 struck a familiar note. This was the strange occurrence at Twin Falls, Idaho, on which True had had a tip months before. A disk moving through a canyon at tremendous speed had whipped the treetops as if by a violent hurricane. The report was brief, but one sentence stood out with a startling effect:

"Twin Falls, Idaho, August 13, 1847," the report began. "There is clearly nothing astronomical in this incident. . . . Two points stand out, the sky-blue color, and the fact that the trees 'spun around on top as if they were in a vacuum.'"

Then came the sentence that made me sit up in my chair.

"Apparently it must be classed with the other bona fide disk sightings."

The other bona fide sightings!

Was this a slip? Or had the Air Force deliberately left this report in the file? If they had, what was back of it

{p. 162}