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Most of the rest of the U.S. News case rested on a "secret" experimental Navy plane, the XF5U or "flying pancake," which was developed by the Navy and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. But the fact was that only one full-scale plane of the XF5U type was ever manufactured (by Chance Vought), and it never flew. A 3,000-lb. scale model, the V-173, made its last test flight in 1947, is now at Norfolk Navy Depot ticketed for transfer to the Smithsonian Institution. It was pictured in U.S. publications, including TIME, in July 1946.
Space Ships. From September 1946 to February 1948, Commander McLaughlin, the 37-year-old Annapolisman who spun the best of the flying-saucer yarns, was chief of the Navy's guided-missiles unit at the White Sands Proving Ground, N.Mex. While there, he sent a report to Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, then in charge of the guided-missile program, that he had sighted a flying saucer at White Sands; he calculated its diameter at 105 ft. Recalled Admiral Gallery last week: "I sent back a message, 'What kind of whisky are you drinking out there?' The Navy has not had, nor does it have now, anything resembling flying saucers . . ."
Shortly after, McLaughlin was moved to a post where he could get some salt air; he became commander of the Bristol. Still vowing that he had seen a saucer in his telescope, he sold the idea to the Sunday supplement This Week, which prepared a four-page EYEWITNESS REPORT stating that "saucers are space ships from another planet." At the last minute, This Week got cold feet; it sold the story to True, which ran it. From essentially the same evidence on which McLaughlin (in True) conjectured that the saucers are made-in-Mars, U.S. News concluded that there are made-in-the-U.S. flying saucers.
The Department of Defense backed up Admiral Gallery's denials of the U.S. News story last week: "None of the three services or any other agency in the Department of Defense is conducting experiments . . . with disc-shaped flying objects which covjld be a basis for the reported phenomena . . . There has been no evidence [to attribute them] to the activity of any foreign nation."
Venus in Daytime. For two years, the Air Force's Project Saucer collected and analyzed "eyewitness" reports of saucers. After evaluating more than 200, the Air Force concluded: "Reports of unidentified flying objects are the result of: 1) misinterpretation of various conventional objects [such as weather balloons, meteors, targets and the planet Venus, which can sometimes be seen in daytime]; 2) a mild form of mass hysteria; or 3) hoaxes." Although Project Saucer has been abandoned, the Air Force continues to study reports, has found nothing to change its conclusions. In his column last week, David Lawrence hinted darkly that there was more to the Project Saucer reports than the Air Force admitted: "Nobody on the outside has been allowed to check up on those reports and analyze them .. ." This was simply not true: since January, the records have been open to the public. A Convivial Round. Others were also guilty of bad reporting. The Taos, N.Mex. Star last week insisted that "3,000 witnesses" had seen a saucer. Fortnight ago the Scripps-Howard Houston Press ran a scarehead on Page One:
WAS IT A FLYING DISC? WEIRD SKY RACER ZOOMS ACROSS