And the flying disks? Army, Navy, and Air Force missiles, launched in droves all over the country to prove whose was the best? A public missile race, with the joint Chiefs of Staff to decide the winner! It seems fantastic that this theory would be believed by any intelligent person. In effect, it accuses the armed services of deliberate, criminal negligence, of endangering millions in the cities below. I am convinced that some of these rumors led to at least one of the published guesses about our missile program. One widely publicized story stated that the flying saucers seen hurtling through our skies are actually two types of secret weapons. One, according to radio and newspaper accounts, is a disk that whizzes through space, halts suspended in the air, soars to thirty thousand feet, drops to one thousand feet, and then usually disintegrates in the air. These saucers, it was said, ranged from 20 inches to 250 feet in diameter. They were supposed to be pilotless—and harmless. The second type was said to be a jet version of the Navy’s circular airfoil “Flying Flapjack.” It was credited with fantastic speed. The “true disks,” however, were mainly Air Force devices, according to the report. “Some are guided, others are not,” said the radio commentator who released this story. “They can stay stationary, dash off to right or left, and move like lightning. But they are utterly harmless.” In these “harmless” disks there was supposed to be an explosive charge that destroyed them in mid-air at a predetermined time. Within a few days after this story was broadcast, the _United States News and World Report_ declared that the saucers are real, and identified them as jet models of Navy “Flying Flapjacks.” This magazine, which is not an official publication despite its name, mentioned the variable-direction jet principle that I had previously described in the True article. These two flying-saucer “explanations” brought denials from the White House, the Navy, and the Air Force. The Air Force flatly declared that: 1. None of the armed forces is conducting secret experiments with disk-shaped flying objects that could be a basis for the reported phenomena. 2. There is no evidence that the latter stem from the activities of any foreign nation. Before this, President Truman stated he knew nothing of any such objects being developed by the United States or any other nation. The Navy denial came immediately after the first broadcast story. It ran: “The Navy is not engaged in research or in flying any jet-powered, circular-shaped aircraft.” The Navy added that one model of a pancake-shaped aircraft, called the Zimmerman Skimmer, was built but was never flown. However, a small, three-thousand-pound scale model did fly and was under radio control during flight. This last device is now being rumored as the Navy’s unpiloted “missile,” said to have been launched over the country like the so-called “harmless” disks.