at the Iron Curtain countries were having their own private
flap. The first indications came in October 1954, when Rumanian
newspapers blamed the United States for launching a drive to induce a
"flying saucer psychosis" in their country. The next month the
Hungarian Government hauled an "expert" up in front of the microphone
so that he could explain to the populace that UFO's don't really
exist because, "all 'flying saucer' reports originate in the
bourgeois countries, where they are invented by the capitalist
warmongers with a view to drawing the people's attention away from
their economic difficulties."

Next the U.S.S.R. itself took up the cry along the same lines when
the voice of the Soviet Army, the newspaper _Red_ _Star_, denounced
the UFO's as, you guessed it, capitalist propaganda.

In 1955 the UFO's were still there because the day before the all-
important May Day celebration, a day when the Soviet radio and TV are
normally crammed with programs plugging the glory of Mother Russia to
get the peasants in the mood for the next day, a member of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences had to get on the air to calm the people's fears.
He left out Wall Street and Dulles this time--UFO's just don't exist.

It was interesting to note that during the whole Iron Curtain Flap,
not one sighting or complimentary comment about the UFO's was made
over the radio or in the newspapers; yet the flap continued. The
reports were obviously being passed on by word of mouth. This fact
seems to negate the theory that if the newspaper reporters and
newscasters would give up the UFO's would go away. The people in
Russia were obviously seeing something.

While the European Flap was in progress, the UFO's weren't entirely
neglecting the United States. The number of reports that were coming
into Project Blue Book were below average, but there were reports.
Many of them would definitely be classed as good, but the best was a
report from a photo reconnaissance B-29 crew that encountered a UFO
almost over Dayton.

About 11:00A.M. on May 24, 1954, an RB-29 equipped with some new
aerial cameras took off from Wright Field, one of the two airfields
that make up Wright-Patterson AFB, and headed toward the Air Force's
photographic test range in Indiana. At exactly twelve noon they were
at 16,000 feet, flying west, about 15 miles northwest of Dayton. A
major, a photo officer, was in the nose seat of the '29. All of the
gun sights and the bombsight in