Word: saucerful
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FIRST ONE IN 1942. Gist of the account: as part of its guided-missile program, the Navy has developed a revolutionary type aircraft, a combination helicopter and jet plane capable of outflying any other; it is this plane that is the flying saucer...
...Wild Statements." What puzzled many Washington newsmen and officials was: How and why did the U.S. News fall for the flying-saucer story? According to Managing Editor L. Noble Robinson, U.S. News "got the idea" for its story from Commander McLaughlin, the same man who wrote the True story. U.S. News did not talk to McLaughlin ("He was out at sea") and did not quote him by name; but the editors had evidently relied heavily on his reports. In port at Boston last week with his destroyer Bristol, McLaughlin disavowed the U.S. News piece as full of "wild statements...
Space Ships. From September 1946 to February 1948, Commander McLaughlin, the 37-year-old Annapolisman who spun the best of the flying-saucer yarns, was chief of the Navy's guided-missiles unit at the White Sands Proving Ground, N.Mex. While there, he sent a report to Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, then in charge of the guided-missile program, that he had sighted a flying saucer at White Sands; he calculated its diameter at 105 ft. Recalled Admiral Gallery last week: "I sent back a message, 'What kind of whisky are you drinking out there...
Shortly after, McLaughlin was moved to a post where he could get some salt air; he became commander of the Bristol. Still vowing that he had seen a saucer in his telescope, he sold the idea to the Sunday supplement This Week, which prepared a four-page EYEWITNESS REPORT stating that "saucers are space ships from another planet." At the last minute, This Week got cold feet; it sold the story to True, which ran it. From essentially the same evidence on which McLaughlin (in True) conjectured that the saucers are made-in-Mars, U.S. News concluded that there...
Venus in Daytime. For two years, the Air Force's Project Saucer collected and analyzed "eyewitness" reports of saucers. After evaluating more than 200, the Air Force concluded: "Reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of: 1) misinterpretation of various conventional objects [such as weather balloons, meteors, targets and the planet Venus, which can sometimes be seen in daytime]; 2) a mild form of mass hysteria; or 3) hoaxes." Although Project Saucer has been abandoned, the Air Force continues to study reports, has found nothing to change its conclusions. In his column last week, David Lawrence hinted darkly...