There is one other factor that must be addressed. In the original contract, it called for a timely conclusion of Project Stork. The sudden surge of cases during the summer of 1952 certainly would have caused some delays because no one had anticipated what would happen. But even after that, with the final status reports becoming single page letters, it took two years for the final report to be written. A legitimate question about the delay can be asked.
For my part, I think the delay was caused by the change in official policy and attitudes reflected in the Project Blue Book files. The CIA's Robertson Panel had looked at the data and decided there was nothing to it. They recommended that the investigations continue, but that the emphasis be on "education." Teach people that UFOs didn't exist. It wouldn't be wise for a private company under contract to the federal government to issue a report that suggested that UFOs did exist that was in conflict with what the CIA had just done.
The delay, then, made it possible to rewrite and reevaluate some of the report and draw conclusions that were not supported by evidence in the body of the text. The thinking had to be that no one would wade through the pages and pages of statistics, and those who did probably wouldn't understand them anyway. The few people who did examine the report, including Ruppelt, acknowledged the weaknesses, but their voices were not heard.
Instead, there was the two or three page summary that gave the conclusion that UFOs don't exist. Rather than presenting scientific evidence for their conclusions, they were now spouting the party line. An idea that had merit originally was reduced to just one more example of how the information was manipulated so that we could be told there was nothing to the UFO phenomenon.
The only problem is that the investigations continued.
August 13, 1956: The First Bentwaters Case
If there is a case that proves that the officers and investigators for Project Blue Book were not interested in finding any answers except those they wanted, this is the report. It involves radar sightings on more than one set at more than one location, it involves jet fighters and attempted intercepts, and it involves visual sightings from the ground. It contains the physical evidence required of the skeptics in the form of radar returns, and it contains the corroborative visual confirmation of something unusual in the sky. But, in the end, the Air Force investigators fumbled the case away suggesting a combination of events that rivals the first of those multiple excuses provided for the Mantell incident of eight years earlier.
It began, according to the Blue Book files at 2130Z, or 9:30 p.m. local time when Tech Sergeant Elmer L. Whenry, a GCA (Ground Controlled Approach) radar operator for the USAF's 1264th AACS Squadron at the RAF Station Bentwaters, England, spotted twelve to fifteen blips on his radarscope. These were not correlated to any of the aircraft known to be in the area at the time.
According to the official Blue Book files, "This group was picked up approximately 8 miles southwest of RAF Station Bentwaters and were tracked on the radar scope clearly until the objects were approximately 14 miles northeast of Bentwaters. At the latter point on the course of these objects, they faded considerably on the radar scope."
The Blue Book report continued, "At the approximate 40 mile range individual objects… appeared to converge into one very large object which appeared to be several times larger than a B-36 aircraft due to the size of the Blip on the radar scope. At the time that the individual objects seemed to converge into one large object, the large object appeared to remain stationary for 10 to 15 minutes. The large object then moved N.E. approximately 5 or 6 miles then stopped its movement for 3 to 5 minutes then moved north disappearing off the radar scope."
At about the same time, Airman Second Class John Vaccare, Jr., another radar operator, spotted a single blip twenty-five to thirty miles southeast. As he watched, the blip seemed to be moving on a 295 degree heading at a very high rate of speed. After about thirty seconds, the blip was fifteen to twenty miles from the radar site, where it disappeared. According to the conservative figures, the object was moving at 5000 miles an hour.
At about 10:00 p.m., about five minutes after Whenry's first sightings had ended, he saw another blip located about thirty miles east of the station. Although the blip was on screen for only sixteen seconds, it moved to a point where is was west of the station and then faded. Calculations suggested that it moved at about 12,000 miles an hour.
From the Bentwaters control tower, others including Staff Sergeant Lawrence S. Wright, reported a bright light, according to the Air Force file. It was the size of a pin head held at arm's length and rose slowly from a point about 10 degrees above the horizon. It remained in sight for about an hour, appearing and disappearing. Nearly everyone who has looked at the file and checked the various star charts and maps have concluded that this object was Mars.
As Whenry was tracking the objects on his scope, a flight of two T-33 jets from the 512th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, returned to Bentwaters after a routine mission. The two pilots, identified in the Blue Book files only as Metz and Rowe (other data revealed their full names as First Lieutenant Charles V. Metz and First Lieutenant Andrew C. Rowe), were asked to try to find the objects. Although they searched the area for forty-five minutes, vectored by the radar operators, they failed to find anything. They broke off and landed about 10:15 p.m.
At 10:55 p.m., another target was spotted, about thirty miles to the east and heading west at only 2000 to 4000 miles an hour. It passed directly overhead and disappeared, from the radar screen, about thirty miles from the base. This time, however, there was an airborne observation. A C-47 pilot saw the object flash beneath his plane. To him it looked like little more than a blur of light.
The pilot wasn't the only person to see the light. On the ground, a number of people, looking up, saw the same bright blur. They provided little in the way of useful description of the object.
There were those who believed that this one segment of the case could be identified, just as Mars seems to have explained the Bentwaters control tower sighting. Analysis by UFO debunker Philip Klass led him to speculate that the pilot only saw a meteor, one of the many that can be seen during the Perseid Meteor showers. Atmospheric physicist James McDonald, who also reviewed the case, disagreed, using the ground observations and the pilot's sighting to suggest the object was between ground level and 4000 feet. Klass failed to mention that there were ground observations of that object as he writes it off. But even if Klass was right (thought I doubt it) about this one sighting, there were others that were not so easily explained.
The sighting by the pilot and the people on the ground was the last of the events at the Bentwaters base. The action shifted to the west-northwest as Lakenheath Air Force Base radars began to pick up the objects. Ground personnel saw a luminous object approach from a southwesterly direction, stop, then shoot off toward the east. Not much later, two white lights appeared, "joined up with another and both disappeared in formation together." Before they vanished, the objects had performed a number of high speed maneuvers. Most importantly, all of this was seen on two separate radar screens at Lakenheath.