But then on the morning of August 20 I was happily taking a shower, getting ready to go to work, when one of these rare occasions occurred and the phone rang—­it was the ATIC OD.  An operational immediate wire had just come in for Blue Book.  He had gone over to the message center and gotten it.  He thought that it was important and wanted me to come right out.  For some reason he didn’t want to read it over the phone, although it was not classified.  I decided that if he said so I should come out, so I left in a hurry.

The wire was from the intelligence officer at an air base in Florida.  The previous night a scoutmaster and three boy scouts had seen a UFO.  The scoutmaster had been burned when he approached too close to the UFO.  The wire went on to give a few sketchy details and state that the scoutmaster was a “solid citizen.”

I immediately put in a long-distance call to the intelligence officer.  He confirmed the data in the wire.  He had talked briefly to the scoutmaster on the phone and from all he could gather it was no hoax.  The local police had been contacted and they verified the story and the fact of the burns.  I asked the intelligence officer to contact the scoutmaster and ask if he would submit to a physical examination immediately.  I could imagine the rumors that could start about the scoutmaster’s condition, and I wanted proof.  The report sounded good, so I told the intelligence officer I’d get down to see him as soon as possible.

I immediately called Colonel Dunn, then chief at ATIC, and gave him a brief rundown.  He agreed that I should go down to Florida as soon as possible and offered to try to get an Air Force B-25, which would save time over the airlines.

I told Bob Olsson to borrow a Geiger counter at Wright Field, then check out a camera.  I called my wife and asked her to pack a few clothes and bring them out to me.  Bob got the equipment, ran home and packed a bag, and in two hours he and I and our two pilots, Captain Bill Hoey and Captain David Douglas, were on our way to Florida to investigate one of the weirdest UFO reports that I came up against.

When we arrived, the intelligence officer arranged for the scoutmaster to come out to the air base.  The latter knew we were coming, so he arrived at the base in a few minutes.  He was a very pleasant chap, in his early thirties, not at all talkative but apparently willing to co-operate.

While he was giving us a brief personal history, I had the immediate impression that he was telling the truth.  He’d lived in Florida all of his life.  He’d gone to a private military prep school, had some college, and then had joined the Marines.  He told us that he had been in the Pacific most of the war and repeated some rather hairy stories of what he’d been through.  After the war he’d worked as an auto mechanic, then gone to Georgia for a while to work in a turpentine plant.  After returning to Florida, he opened a gas station, but some hard luck had forced him to sell out.  He was now working as a clerk in a hardware store.  Some months back a local church had decided to organize a boy scout troop and he had offered to be the scoutmaster.