Growing up in a family with a career Air Force officer like your father can be daunting. Lots of kids have to deal with moving from one place to another, basic housing and a hundred other things that will drive you crazy if you let them. I was lucky to have been born late in the life of my parents. When I arrived, my dad had a stable job and was about to retire. We lived on Long Island and I didn’t face many of the challenges that other “military snots” had to face. However, there was an elephant in the room that he couldn’t ignore…
After my father retired from the Air Force, his up-and-go personality immediately pushed him into another job. As vice president of a construction equipment company that sold and rented everything from forklifts to massive tower cranes, he was busy because his company had contracts to supply the equipment needed to build the World’s Fair in New York in the early 1990s. 1960 and the World Trade Center. buildings a little later. Since he had two important jobs in his life, it was not uncommon to find my parents dining with the Kennedy brothers or the Rockefeller heirs at the New York Athletic Club. The downside was that flying saucers were all over the news in the 1950s and 1960s, so my father was constantly faced with questions about them from friends who were sometimes very powerful.
As a child, I was fascinated by flying saucers. Every time he would ask my father about them, he would just say that the government has stated that they are mostly misidentified planes and there is nothing to worry about. That was his standard response to anyone who questioned him on the subject. I would have been fine with that answer, but there was a problem with that. He was being honest when he expressed the government’s position. That’s not to say I didn’t privately disagree with it. We had a constant stream of training and even still active Air Force pilots coming over to the house to barbecue or just hang out with my dad. They did not support the official government position on Unidentified Flying Objects (a term created by the US government).
As an only child, I spent as much time with adults as I did with children. I quickly learned to be quiet and listen. That paid off when the pilots came to our house and the subject of UFOs came up. Almost every pilot had a UFO story. If they plan to share it, they were questioned about the details by others present. These were not casual conversations. Pilots get very technical when it comes to proving or disproving a controversial issue that occurs in flight. It was easy to see that the pilots I heard were not convinced by the government experts who had an explanation for each sighting. They were also certain that this was not something the Russians built and blew up.
Chuck Yeager, the military pilot who first broke the sound barrier in 1947, typifies what I faced as a child from my father and his pilot friends. Yeager was asked if he ever saw a UFO on Twitter. He said, “No. I don’t drink before I fly.” I’m sorry to disagree and I think that statement was an unnecessary insult to credible pilots who have chosen to record their own sightings and encounters. The Twitter response is obviously his public statement. However, I remember very clearly that he said something very different in the 1960s.
When I was a kid, my dad was invited to a cookout at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. I went with him. The keynote speaker was Yeager. After a brief talk about some of his many adventures in the air, he recounted one more that instantly caught the attention of everyone present. Several pilots asked Chuck what he thought about Flying Saucers. He then gave the many pilots and Air Force personnel present a rare opportunity to hear a story he would never share with the general public…
Yeager said that during the test flights of the Bell aircraft that he ultimately used to break the sound barrier, a procedure was put in place. An onboard camera filmed each flight. He and a briefing panel made up of Air Force officers, General Electric civil engineers who built the Bell’s engines, and a doctor then viewed the footage. Then they would discuss the flight. On one occasion he said that a large disc-shaped object appeared on the starboard side of his jet. Then, he almost instantly moved in front of his plane.
The Bell was like a flying bullet. It was not very maneuverable at those speeds. If this object slowed or stopped, Yeager knew it would end up as a bug on the windshield. As that thought passed through his head, the object suddenly vanished. Later, when he went to the interrogation, things were very different from normal. No projector, no screen, no Air Force officers, no civil engineers, and no doctor. Only Yeager and a guy in a suit tried to say that the object was a new secret plane being tested by the military.
Yeager knew all the other test pilots and was sure they would have heard of something as advanced as the object he saw. Then, the man warned him not to talk about the meeting. I have a wonderful memory and I remember him telling that story as if it happened yesterday. And therein lies the problem… Publicly, government experts called these objects swamp gas, known misidentified aircraft, and hallucinations. Publicly, the pilots and other military agree with them or simply do not comment on the issue. In private, it was obviously another story.
My dad danced around this conflict of two truths until he finally told me that some things get categorized for a good reason. Adults, he explained, are sometimes forced to lie to keep people safe. “Sure?” I thought. About what? Anyway, he said that lying was a bad habit and suggested that I stay away from him. I followed his advice. My classmates were interested in flying saucers because of all the headlines about them in the 1960s. I decided to pick that topic for a feature story I had to do. We all take turns reading our reports to the class. I included Yeager’s story in mine. When I finished you could hear a pin drop across the room.
My teacher loved the report, but wondered if Yeager’s story was true. She called my dad. At the end of the day she was at school with two guys in suits. My report is gone, the teacher never asked me about it again, and my classmates only talked to me about flying saucers at lunch or during recess. I told the truth, but it was not a truth accepted by the government. The good news was that my non-existence report still gave me a 100% rating. I guess it really pays to tell the truth.
