s from Long Beach said that during
the period that the intercept was taking place they had gone outside
and looked at their balloon; it was an exceptionally clear day and
they could see it at unusually high altitudes. They didn't see any F-
86's around it. And one stronger point, the balloon had burst about
ten minutes before the F-86's lost sight of the UFO.

Lieutenant Metscher took over and, riding on his Fort Monmouth
victory, tried to show how the pilots had seen the balloon. He got
the same thing I did--nothing.

On October 27, 1951, the new Project Grudge was officially
established. I'd written the necessary letters and had received the
necessary endorsements. I'd estimated, itemized, and justified direct
costs and manpower. I'd conferred, inferred, and referred, and now I
had the money to operate. The next step was to pile up all this paper
work as an aerial barrier, let the saucers crash into it, and fall
just outside the door.

I was given a very flexible operating policy for Project Grudge
because no one knew the best way to track down UFO's. I had only one
restriction and that was that I wouldn't have my people spending time
doing a lot of wild speculating. Our job would be to analyze each and
every UFO report and try to find what we believed to be an honest,
unbiased answer. If we could not identify the reported object as
being a balloon, meteor, planet, or one of half a hundred other
common things that are sometimes called UFO's, we would mark the
folder "Unknown" and file it in a special file. At some later date,
when we built up enough of these "Unknown" reports, we'd study them.

As long as I was chief of the UFO project, this was our basic rule.
If anyone became anti-flying saucer and was no longer capable of
making an unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went. Conversely
anyone who became a believer was through. We were too busy during the
initial phases of the project to speculate as to whether the unknowns
were spaceships, space monsters, Soviet weapons, or ethereal visions.

I had to let three people go for being too pro or too con.

By the latter part of November 1951 I knew most of what had taken
place in prior UFO projects and what I expected to do. The people in
Project Sign and the old Project Grudge had made many mistakes. I
studied these mistakes and profited by them. I could see that my
predecessors had had a rough job. Mine would be a little bit easier
because of the pioneering t