Since Captain James was the chief of the radar section and he had said “Weather,” weather was the official conclusion on the report.  But reports of UFO’s’ being picked up on radar are controversial, and some of the people didn’t agree with James’s conclusion.

A month or two after we’d received the report, I was out in Colorado Springs at Air Defense Command Headquarters.  I was eating lunch in the officers’ club when I saw an officer from the radar operations section at ADC.  He asked me to stop by his office when I had a spare minute, and I said that I would.  He said that it was important.

It was the middle of the afternoon before I saw him and found out what he wanted.  He had been in Alaska on TDY when the UFO had been picked up at the outpost radar site.  In fact, he had made a trip to both the radar site and the interceptor base just two days after the sighting, and he had talked about the sighting with the people who had seen the UFO on the radar.  He wanted to know what we thought about it.

When I told him that the sighting had been written off as weather, I remember that he got a funny look on his face and said, “Weather!  What are you guys trying to pull, anyway?”

It was obvious that he didn’t agree with our conclusion.  I was interested in learning what this man thought because I knew that he was one of ADC’s ace radar trouble shooters and that he traveled all over the world, on loan from ADC, to work out problems with radars.

“From the description of what the targets looked like on the radarscopes, good, strong, bright images, I can’t believe that they were caused by weather,” he told me.

Then he went on to back up his argument by pointing out that when the ground radar was switched to short range both the F-94 and the unknown target disappeared.  If just the unknown target had disappeared, then it could have been weather.  But since both disappeared, very probably the radar set wasn’t working on short ranges for some reason.  Next he pointed out that if there was a temperature inversion, which is highly unlikely in northern Alaska, the same inversion that would affect the ground radar wouldn’t be present at 25,000 feet or above.

I told him about the report from Oak Ridge that Captain James had used as an example, but he didn’t buy this comparison.  At Oak Ridge, he pointed out, that F-82 was at only 4,000 feet.  He didn’t know how the F-94’s could get to within 200 yards of an object without seeing it, unless the object was painted a dull black.

“No,” he said, “I can’t believe that those radar targets were caused by weather.  I’d be much more inclined to believe that they were something real, something that we just don’t know about.”