As soon as the pilots were on the ground, the magazine of film from the gun camera was rushed to the photo lab and developed.  The photos showed only a round, indistinct blob—­no details—­but they were proof that some type of unidentified flying object had been in the air north of Dayton.

Lieutenant Andy Flues was assigned to this one.  He checked the locations of balloons and found out that a 20-foot-diameter radiosonde weather balloon from Wright-Patterson had been very near the area when the unsuccessful intercept took place, but the balloon wasn’t traveling 525 miles an hour and it couldn’t be picked up by the ground radar, so he investigated further.  The UFO couldn’t have been another airplane because airplanes don’t hover in one spot and it was no atmospheric phenomenon.  Andy wrote it off as an unknown but it still bothered him; that balloon in the area was mighty suspicious.  He talked to the two pilots a half dozen times and spent a day at the radar site at Bellefontaine before he reversed his “Unknown” decision and came up with the answer.

The unidentified target that the radar had tracked across Ohio was a low-flying jet.  The jet was unidentified because there was a mix-up and the radar station didn’t get its flight plan.  Andy checked and found that a jet out of Cleveland had landed at Memphis at about eleven-forty.  At ten forty-five this jet would have been north of Dayton on a southwesterly heading.  When the ground controller blended the targets of the two F-86’s into the unidentified target, they were at 30,000 feet and were looking for the target at their altitude or higher so they missed the low-flying jet—­but they did see the balloon.  Since the radar went out just as the pilots saw the balloon, the ground controller couldn’t see that the unidentified target he’d been watching was continuing on to the southwest.  The pilots didn’t bother to look around any more once they’d spotted the balloon because they thought they had the target in sight.

The only part of the sighting that still wasn’t explained was the radar pickup on the F-86’s gun sight.  Lieutenant Flues checked around, did a little experimenting, and found out that the small transmitter box on a radiosonde balloon will give an indication on the radar used in F-86 gun sights.

To get a final bit of proof, Lieutenant Flues took the gun camera photos to the photo lab.  The two F-86’s had been at about 40,000 feet when the photos were taken and the 20-foot balloon was at about 70,000 feet.  Andy’s question to the photo lab was, “How big should a 20-foot balloon appear on a frame of 16-mm. movie film when the balloon is 30,000 feet away?”

The people in the photo lab made a few calculations and measurements and came up with the answer, “A 20-foot balloon photographed from 30,000 feet away would be the same size as the UFO in the gun camera photos.”

By the middle of August, Project Blue Book was back to normal.  Lieutenant Flues’s Coca-Cola consumption had dropped from twenty bottles a day in mid-July to his normal five.  We were all getting a good night’s sleep and it was now a rare occasion when my home telephone would ring in the middle of the night to report a new UFO.