the light had drifted over the base, had stopped for about a minute, turned, and was now heading north.  To settle the bet, one of the officers stepped into the base weather office to find out about the balloon.  Yes, one was in the air and being tracked by radar, he was told.  The weather officer said that he would call to find out exactly where it was.  He called and found out that the weather balloon was being tracked due west of the base and that the light had gone out about ten minutes before.  The officer went back outside to find that what was first thought to be a balloon was now straight north of the field and still lighted.  To add to the confusion, a second amber light had appeared in the west about 20 degrees lower than where the first one was initially seen, and it was also heading north but at a much greater speed.  In a few seconds the first light stopped and started moving back south over the base.

While the group of officers and airmen were watching the two lights, the people from the weather office came out to tell the UFO observers that the balloon was still traveling straight west.  They were just in time to see a third light come tearing across the sky, directly overhead, from west to east.  A weatherman went inside and called the balloon-tracking crew again—­their balloon was still far to the west of the base.

Inside of fifteen minutes two more amber lights came in from the west, crossed the base, made a 180-degree turn over the ocean, and came back over the observers.

In the midst of the melee a radar set had been turned on but it couldn’t pick up any targets.  This did, however, eliminate the possibility of the lights’ being aircraft.  They weren’t stray balloons either, because the winds at all altitudes were blowing in a westerly direction.  They obviously weren’t meteors.  They weren’t searchlights on a haze layer because there was no weather conducive to forming a haze layer and there were no searchlights.  They could have been some type of natural phenomenon, if one desires to take the negative approach.  Or, if you take the positive approach, they could have been spaceships.

The next night radar at Washington National Airport picked up UFO’s and one of the most highly publicized sightings of UFO history was in the making.  It marked the beginning of the end of the Big Flap.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Washington Merry-Go-Round

No flying saucer report in the history of the UFO ever won more world acclaim than the Washington National Sightings.

When radars at the Washington National Airport and at Andrews AFB, both close to the nation’s capital, picked up UFO’s, the sightings beat the Democratic National Convention out of headline space.  They created such a furor that I had inquiries from the office of the President of the United States and from the press in London, Ottawa, and Mexico City.  A junior-sized riot was only narrowly averted in the lobby of the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington when I refused to tell U.S. newspaper reporters what I knew about the sightings.