But this wasn’t all there was to the report.  A matter of minutes after the sighting a pilot radioed Terre Haute that he had seen a UFO.  He was flying from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, when just east of Paris he’d looked back and to his left.  There, level with his airplane and fairly close, was a large silvery object, “like a flattened orange,” hanging motionless in the sky.  He looked at it a few seconds, then hauled his plane around in a tight left bank.  He headed directly toward the UFO, but it suddenly began to pick up speed and shot off toward the northeast.  The time, by the clock on his instrument panel, was 1:45P.M.—­just two minutes after the sighting at Terre Haute.

When I finished calling I got an aeronautical chart out of the file and plotted the points of the sighting.  The CAA employee had seen the UFO disappear over the northwestern horizon.  The pilot had been flying from Greencastle, Indiana, to Paris, Illinois, so he’d have been flying on a heading of just a little less than 270 degrees, or almost straight west.  He was just east of Paris when he’d first seen the UFO, and since he said that he’d looked back and to his left, the spot where he saw the UFO would be right at a spot where the CAA man had seen his UFO disappear.  Both observers had checked their watches with radio time just after the sightings, so there couldn’t be more than a few seconds’ discrepancy.  All I could conclude was that both had seen the same UFO.

I checked the path of every balloon in the Midwest.  I checked the weather—­it was a clear, cloudless day; I had the two observers’ backgrounds checked and I even checked for air traffic, although I knew the UFO wasn’t an airplane.  I researched the University of Dayton library for everything on daylight meteors, but this was no good.  From the description the CAA employee gave, what he’d seen had been a clear-cut, distinct, flattened sphere, with no smoke trail, no sparks and no tail.  A daylight meteor, so low as to be described as “a 50-cent piece held at arm’s length,” would have had a smoke trail, sparks, and would have made a roar that would have jolted the Sphinx.  This one was quiet.  Besides, no daylight meteor stops long enough to let an airplane turn into it.

Conclusion:  Unknown.

In a few days the data from the Long Beach Incident came in and I started to put it together.  A weather balloon had been launched from the Long Beach Airport, and it was in the vicinity where the six F-86’s had made their unsuccessful attempt to intercept a UFO.  I plotted out the path of the balloon, the reported path of the UFO, and the flight paths of the F-86’s.  The paths of the balloon and the F-86’s were accurate, I knew, because the balloon was being tracked by radio fixes and the F-86’s had been tracked by radar.  At only one point did the paths of the balloon, UFO, and F-86’s coincide.  When the first two F-86’s made their initial visual contact with the UFO they were looking almost directly at the balloon.  But from then on, even by altering the courses of the F-86’s, I couldn’t prove a thing.