a few seconds since no other airplanes were supposed to be in the area.  He glanced out at number four engine for a few seconds, looked back, and he saw that the light was in about the same position as when he’d first seen it.  Then he looked down at the prop controls, synchronized the engines, and looked up again.  In the few seconds that he had glanced away from the light, it had moved to the right so that it was now directly ahead of the DC-4, and it had increased in size.  The copilot reached over and slapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed.  Just at that instant the light began to get bigger and bigger until it was “ten times the size of a landing light of an airplane.”  It continued to close in and with a flash it streaked by the DC-4’s left wing.  Before the crew could react and say anything, two more smaller balls of fire flashed by.  Both pilots later said that they sat in their seats for several seconds with sweat trickling down their backs.

It was one of these two pilots who later said, “Were you ever traveling along the highway about 70 miles an hour at night, have the car that you were meeting suddenly swerve over into your lane and then cut back so that you just miss it by inches?  You know the sort of sick, empty feeling you get when it’s all over?  That’s just the way we felt.”

As soon as the crew recovered from the shock, the pilot picked up his mike, called Jacksonville Radio, and told them about the incident.  Minutes later we had the report.  The next afternoon Lieutenant Kerry Rothstien, who had replaced Lieutenant Metscher on the project, was on his way to New York to meet the pilots when they returned from Puerto Rico.

When Kerry talked to the two pilots, they couldn’t add a great deal to their original story.  Their final comment was the one we all had heard so many times, “I always thought these people who reported flying saucers were crazy, but now I don’t know.”

When Lieutenant Rothstien returned to Dayton he triple-checked with the CAA for aircraft in the area—­but there were none.  Could there have been airplanes in the area that CAA didn’t know about?  The answer was almost a flat “No.”  No one would fly 600 miles off the coast without filing a flight plan; if he got into trouble or went down, the Coast Guard or Air Rescue Service would have no idea where to look.

Kerry was given the same negative answer when he checked on surface shipping.

The last possibility was that the UFO’s were meteors, but several points in the pilots’ story ruled these out.  First, there was a solid overcast at about 18,000 feet.  No meteor cruises along straight and level below 18,000 feet.  Second, on only rare occasions have meteors been seen traveling three in trail.  The chances of seeing such a phenomenon are well over one in a billion.

Some people have guessed that some kind of an atmospheric phenomenon can form a “wall of air” ahead of an airplane that will act as a mirror and that lights seen at night by pilots are nothing more than the reflection of the airplane’s own lights.  This could be true in some cases, but to have a reflection you must have a light to reflect.  There are no lights on an airplane that even approach being “ten times the size of a landing light.”