The Consensus at Year's End
. . . By now, ATIC had received 156 UFO reports and was settling down to a routine of studying reports of flying saucers. To determine whether these objects were Soviet craft, ATIC studied recent German aeronautical research, assisted in large measure by the presence of German aviation experts at Wright Field. They seem to have ruled out the Soviets at this time. The aerodynamicists at ATIC, Wright Field's Aircraft Laboratory, and the Aeromedical Laboratory of the Air Force realized that (1) no known aircraft could do what UFOs were reported to be doing; (2) even if such an aircraft could be built, the human body could not survive the violent maneuvers that were reported; and (3) no known material could withstand the loads of the reported maneuvers, nor the heat caused by the high speeds. This line of reasoning helped to persuade the scientists that neither the Soviets nor Americans were probable sources for the flying saucers.
Today, we know that the UFOs of 1947 were not caused by Soviet or American craft, and that American analysts quickly came to the same conclusion. We are obligated to ask, then, what else could they have been? Could they have been illusions or natural atmospheric phenomena? Mass hysteria? Hoaxes?
The scientists studying the problem at ATIC did not think so, at least not for the difficult, unexplained cases. Overall, they agreed with Twining's statement that UFOs were real objects, not imaginary or illusions. For this reason, a certain significant number of analysts (we do not know how many) believed it probable that flying saucers were interplanetary. The evidence seemed to rule out everything else. A memo from this period asked, "why couldn't these people, whoever they might be, stand these horrible maneuver forces? Why judge them by earthly standards?"
Publicly, talk about flying saucers was in the opposite vein. . . .