I had this build-up of reports in mind one Sunday night, June 15 to be exact, when the OD at ATIC called me at home and said that we were getting a lot of reports from Virginia.  Each report by itself wasn’t too good, the OD told me, but together they seemed to mean something.  He suggested that I come out and take a look at them—­so I did.

Individually they weren’t too good, but when I lined them up chronologically and plotted them on a map they took the form of a hot report.

At 3:40P.M. a woman at Unionville, Virginia, had reported a “very shiny object” at high altitude.

At 4:20P.M. the operators of the CAA radio facility at Gordonsville, Virginia, had reported that they saw a “round, shiny object.”  It was southeast of their station, or directly south of Unionville.

At 4:25P.M. the crew of an airliner northwest of Richmond, Virginia, reported a “silver sphere at eleven o’clock high.”

At 4:43P.M. a Marine pilot in a jet tried to intercept a “round shiny sphere” south of Gordonsville.

At 5:43P.M. an Air Force T-33 jet tried to intercept a “shiny sphere” south of Gordonsville.  He got above 35,000 feet and the UFO was still far above him.

At 7:35P.M. many people in Blackstone, Virginia, about 80 miles south of Gordonsville, reported it.  It was a “round, shiny object with a golden glow” moving from north to south.  By this time radio commentators in central Virginia were giving a running account of the UFO’s progress.

At 7:59P.M. the people in the CAA radio facility at Blackstone saw it.

At 8:00P.M. jets arrived from Langley AFB to attempt to intercept it, but at 8:05P.M. it disappeared.

This was a good report because it was the first time we ever received a series of reports on the same object, and there was no doubt that all these people had reported the same object.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving too fast, because it had traveled only about 90 miles in four hours and twenty-five minutes.  I was about ready to give up until morning and go home when my wife called.  The local Associated Press man had called our home and she assumed that it was about this sighting.  She had just said that I was out so he might not call the base.  I decided that I’d better keep working so I’d have the answer in time to keep the story out of the papers.  A report like this could cause some excitement.

The UFO obviously wasn’t a planet because it was moving from north to south, and it was too slow to be an airplane.  I called the balloon-plotting center at Lowry AFB, where the tracks of the big skyhook balloons are plotted, but the only big balloons in the air were in the western United States, and they were all accounted for.