Feeling like a national martyr because I planned to work all night if necessary, I laid the course of my investigation.  I would go to Washington National Airport, Andrews AFB, airlines offices, the weather bureau, and a half dozen other places scattered all over the capital city.  I called the transportation section at the Pentagon to get a staff car but it took me only seconds to find out that the regulations said no staff cars except for senior colonels or generals.  Colonel Bower tried—­same thing.  General Samford and General Garland were gone, so I couldn’t get them to try to pressure a staff car out of the hillbilly who was dispatching vehicles.  I went down to the finance office—­could I rent a car and charge it as travel expense?  No—­city buses are available.  But I didn’t know the bus system and it would take me hours to get to all the places I had to visit, I pleaded.  You can take a cab if you want to pay for it out of your per diem was the answer.  Nine dollars a day per diem and I should pay for a hotel room, meals, and taxi fares all over the District of Columbia.  Besides, the lady in finance told me, my travel orders to Washington covered only a visit to the Pentagon.  In addition, she said, I was supposed to be on my way back to Dayton right now, and if I didn’t go through all the red tape of getting the orders amended I couldn’t collect any per diem and technically I’d be AWOL.  I couldn’t talk to the finance officer, the lady informed me, because he always left at 4:30 to avoid the traffic and it was now exactly five o’clock and she was quitting.

At five-one I decided that if saucers were buzzing Pennsylvania Avenue in formation I couldn’t care less.  I called Colonel Bower, explained my troubles, and said that I was through.  He concurred, and I caught the next airliner to Dayton.

When I returned I dropped in to see Captain Roy James in the radar branch and told him about the sighting.  He said that he thought it sounded as if the radar targets had been caused by weather but since he didn’t have the finer details he naturally couldn’t make any definite evaluation.

The good UFO reports that Lieutenant Flues had told me about when I called him from Washington had tripled in number before I got around to looking at them.  Our daily take had risen to forty a day, and about a third of them were classified as unknowns.

More amber-red fights like those seen on July 18 had been observed over the Guided Missile Long-Range Proving Ground at Patrick AFB, Florida.  In Uvalde, Texas, a UFO described as “a large, round, silver object that spun on its vertical axis” was seen to cross 100 degrees of afternoon sky in forty-eight seconds.  During part of its flight it passed between two towering cumulus clouds.  At Los Alamos and Holyoke, Massachusetts, jets had chased UFO’s.  In both cases the UFO’s had been lost as they turned into the sun.

In two night encounters, one in New Jersey and one in Massachusetts, F-94’s tried unsuccessfully to intercept unidentified lights reported by the Ground Observer Corps.  In both cases the pilots of the radar-nosed jet interceptors saw a light; they closed in and their radar operators got a lock-on.  But the lock-ons were broken in a few seconds, in both cases, as the light apparently took violent evasive maneuvers.