ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

36 The Hunt for Zero Point
aircraft." These discs exhibited a number of common characteristics,
amongst them a metallic or light-reflecting surface, an absence of any jet
trail and no propulsion sound.
In addition, they were capable of "extreme rates of climb, maneuverability
(particularly in roll), and action which must be considered
evasive when sighted."
For an Air Force officer—a senior one, even—to admit to the reality
of UFOs was quite an admission, but it was not unique. Other thenclassified
memos from other USAAF officers of the day show them to
have been similarly perplexed by the disc sightings phenomenon across
America from mid-1947 onward.
UFO researchers had seized on these documents as evidence that the
USAAF (and from 1947 its successor, the USAF) recognized the reality
of UFOs while officially pooh-poohing them—a blanket denial that
remains policy to this day.
My attention, however, had been drawn to something quite else.
As an aerospace analyst, and in light of the Brown research, I found the
key part of Twining's memo in what followed. UFO researchers had
concentrated entirely on the main thrust of the memo: Twining's
acknowledgment of the reality of UFOs.
The part that interested me, the postscript, added almost as an
afterthought, had been totally overlooked. It so absorbed me that I never
noticed the pencil on which I set down my cup of lukewarm coffee. It
tipped over and the drink spilled, spreading across the open pages like ink
on a blotter. I swore, mopped it up as best I could and returned to the
text. The stain, as poor luck would have it, had covered the paragraph I
was interested in, making the task of rereading it a painfully slow affair. I
uttered the words aloud, enunciating them slowly so I knew I had read it
right.
"It is possible," Twining wrote, "within the present U.S.
knowledge—provided extensive detailed development is undertaken—
to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the
object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000
miles at subsonic speeds."
As head of Air Materiel Command, the branch of the USAAF that
assumed responsibility for all USAAF aircraft development, Twining—
who would have written the memo under the best advice from his
subordinates—should have known what he was talking about. The problem
was that 50 years this side of Twining's memo, at the end of the
20th century, I still knew of no combat aircraft capable of the performance
characteristics Twining had elucidated. Even the Lockheed