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then made another left bank.  I put my 51 into a sharp turn court-martial rumor, he gave me a searching glance.
and tried to cut it off, said Gorman.  By then we were at about  Where did you hear that?
seven thousand feet, Suddenly it made a sharp right turn and we  Several places, I told him.  At Chicago, in Salt Lake City
headed straight at each other. Just when we were about to collide  in fact, we ve been hearing it all over.
I guess I lost my nerve. I went into a dive and the light passed  Well, there s nothing to it, Gorman declared. He changed
over my canopy at about five hundred feet. Then it made a left the subject.
circle about 1,000 feet above and I gave chase again. Some time afterward, a Fargo pilot told me there had been
When collision seemed imminent a second time, the object trouble over the ramming story.
shot straight into the air. Gorman climbed after it at full  But it wasn t Gorman s fault. Somebody else released that
throttle. report to the A.P. The news story didn t actually say there was an
Just about this time, two. other witnesses, a private pilot and Air Force order to ram it, but the idea got around, and we heard
his passenger, saw the fast-moving light. The pilot was Dr. A. D. that Washington squawked. Gorman had a pretty rough time of
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it for a while. Some of the newspapers razzed his story. And the In the Saturday Evening Post of May 7, 1949, Sidney Shallett
Project  Saucer teams really worked on him. I guess they were analyzed the Gorman case, in the second of his articles on flying
trying to scare him into saying he was mistaken, and it was a saucers. Shallet suggested this solution: that Gorman had chased
balloon. one of the Navy s giant cosmic-ray research balloons. Each of
When I asked Gorman about this, he denied he d had rough these huge balloons is lighted, so that night-flying planes will
treatment by the Project teams. not collide with the gas bag or the instrument case suspended
 Sure, they asked about a thousand questions, and I could tell below. Shallett concluded that Gorman was suffering from
they thought it might be a hoax at first. But that was before they a combination of vertigo and confusion with the light on the
quizzed the others who saw it. balloon.
 Anybody suggest it was a balloon? I said casually. As already mentioned, these huge Navy balloons are filled
 At first, they were sure that s what it was, answered Gorman. with only a small amount of helium before their release at
 You see, there was a weather balloon released here. You know Minneapolis. They then rise swiftly to very high altitudes, unless
the kind, it has a lighted candle on it. The Project teams said I d a leak develops. In Shallett s words,  These balloons travel high
chased after that candle and just imagined the light s maneuvers and fast. . . .
 confused it with my own movement, because of the dark. Fargo is about two hundred miles from Minneapolis.
Gorman grinned.  They had it just about wrapped up  until Normally, a cosmic-ray research balloon would have reached a
they talked to George Sanderson. He s the weather observer. very high altitude by the time it had drifted this far. The only
He was tracking the balloon with a theodolite, and he showed possible answer to its low-altitude sighting would be a serious
them his records. The time and altitudes didn t fit, and the wind leak.
direction was wrong. The balloon was drifting in the opposite If a leaking balloon had come down to one thousand feet at
direction. Both the tower men backed him up. So that killed the Fargo, it would either have remained at that height or kept on
weather-balloon idea. descending. The mystery light was observed at this altitude moving
The next step by Project  Saucer investigators had been to at high speed. If a Cub s outline was visible against the lighted
look for some unidentified aircraft. This failed, too. Obviously, football field, the massive shape of even a partly deflated balloon
it was only routine; the outline of a conventional plane would would have stood out like an elephant. Even before release, the
certainly have been seen by Gorman and the men in the tower. partially inflated gas bags are almost a hundred feet tall. The crowd
An astronomical check by Professor Hynek ruled out stars, at the football game would certainly have seen such a monstrous
fireballs, and comets  a vain hope, to begin with. The only shape above the glare of the floodlights, for the plastic balloons
other conventional answer, as the Project report later stated, was gleam brightly in any light rays. The two C.A.A. men, watching
hallucination. In view of all the testimony, hallucination had with binoculars, could not possibly have missed it.
to he ruled out. Finally, the investigators admitted they had no For the cosmic-balloon answer to be correct, this leaking
solution. The first Project  Saucer report, on April 27, 1949, left gas bag would have had to rise swiftly to 17,000 feet  after a
the Gorman  mystery light unidentified. loss of helium had forced it down to one thousand. As a balloon
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pilot, I know this is impossible. The Project  Saucer report said When I read it, in the preliminary report, I was amazed. Here
unequivocally:  The object could outturn and outspeed the F-51, was the concluding sentence:
and was able to attain a much steeper climb and to maintain a
constant rate of climb far in excess of the Air Force fighter. The mystery was cleared up when the object was identified
A leaking balloon? More and more, I became convinced that positively as a cluster of cosmic-ray research balloons.
Secretary Forrestal had persuaded some editors that it was their
patriotic duty to conceal the answer, whatever it was. That thought Even one of the giant balloons would have been hard to take
had begun to worry me, because of my part in this investigation. as the explanation. Combs was almost sure to have collided with
Perhaps John Steele had been right, and we shouldn t be trying it in his head-on passes. But an entire cluster! I tried to picture
to dig out the answer. But I had already told Purdy, and he had the T-6 zooming and twisting through the night sky, with several
agreed, that if national security was involved, we would drop the huge balloons in its path. It would be a miracle if Combs got
thing completely. through without hitting one of them, even if each balloon was
By the time I had proved the balloon answer wrong, I was lighted. But he had seen only one light; so had Lieutenant Jackson. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]