Grand-daddy of All UFO Sightings -- Part IV

This is big: I have never done a four-part posting on High Strangeness, but this Grand-daddy of All UFO Sightings has got legs! It all started out last month when I read a shocking passage in a 1956 book called "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects" revealing that the U.S. government had a way to predict when and where UFOs would appear. I thought it was a bombshell, so I started asking every knowledgeable person I could find if they thought this was real...

So far, only one or two readers have gotten as excited about this as I have. The experts? They all shrugged it off.

But I do not give up easily, as anyone who has followed my attempts to restage "Roswell: The Musical" or witnessed my efforts to organize the Million Intruder March to penetrate the defenses of Area 51 can attest. Yes, the MIM is supposed to be happening this week -- today in fact -- but I'm not giving up! You can count on that.

So when I found myself in the presence of the Council of Elders last weekend I thought I would see how they would respond to my bombshell. As I have recounted in an earlier post in this series, these guys had already written it up in their book "UFOs and Government," and came to the following conclusion:

"Even without knowing anything more about this mysterious prediction, it is, to say the least, interesting because it came true. It is also of some direct interest to the subject of this book, as it indicates that people other than the Air Force had monitored UFO activity and had attempted to pattern and predict it."

I found that analysis lacking, so when I had to chance to talk to the disembodied brains face-to-cerebellum I asked them what they thought of the "UFO prediction" claim.

Apparently, control tower operators are gullible fools.

One of the brains jumped right in and said that the Air Force was doing a lot at that time to develop ECM, or electric counter-measures--including the ability to project false radar returns--and that the "prediction" was nothing more than someone letting the cat out of the bag that an intelligence agency was about to unleash a barrage of phony UFOs on Washington, D.C.-- a program they allegedly dubbed "Project Signpost"--to see how the military and the public would react.

It's an intriguing hypothesis, but I can't buy it, and here's why: I didn't think of it. Actually, that's only reason. The other reason is that if this were true, then the objects appearing in the skies above our nation's capital in July 1952 were all bogus decoys, and that's a stretch. For one thing, most UFOlogists, including the Elders, agree that there were true unknowns in the sky those two nights. So, since you can't have your cake and eat it, too, it follows that you can't have a sky full of unknown objects and a sky full of decoys... or if you do, then you've got the Grand-daddy of all coincidences.

I prefer to think that, if the Elders' theory is correct, it means ET knew the government was going to be sending out decoys and decided to descend on Washington in force just to fuck with everybody. That's a theory I can get behind.