On the night before the weekly scout meeting had broken up early.  He said that he had offered to give four of the boys a ride home.  He had let one of the boys out when the conversation turned to a stock car race that was to take place soon.  They talked about the condition of the track.  It had been raining frequently, and they wondered if the track was flooded, so they drove out to look at it.  Then they started south toward a nearby town to take another of the boys home.  They took a black-top road about 10 miles inland from the heavily traveled coastal highway that passes through sparsely settled areas of scrub pine and palmetto thickets.

They were riding along when the scoutmaster said that he noticed a light off to his left in the pines.  He slowed down and asked the boys if they’d seen it; none of them had.  He started to drive on, when he saw the lights again.  This time all of the boys saw them too, so he stopped.  He said that he wanted to go back into the woods to see what was going on, but that the boys were afraid to stay alone.  Again he started to drive on, but in a few seconds decided he had to go back.  So he turned the car around, went back, and parked beside the road at a point just opposite where he’d seen the lights.

I stopped him at this point to find out a little bit more about why he’d decided to go back.  People normally didn’t go running off into palmetto thickets infested with rattlesnakes at night.  He had a logical answer.  The lights looked like an airplane crashing into the woods some distance away.  He didn’t believe that was what he saw, but the thought that this could be a possibility bothered him.  After all, he had said, he was a scoutmaster, and if somebody was in trouble, his conscience would have bothered him the rest of his life if he hadn’t investigated and it had been somebody in need of help.

A fifteen-minute radio program had just started, and he told the boys that he was going to go into the woods, and that if he wasn’t back by the time the program ended they should run down the road to a farmhouse that they had passed and get help.  He got out and started directly into the woods, wearing a faded denim billed cap and carrying machete and two flashlights.  One of the lights was a spare he carried in his back pocket.

He had traveled about 50 yards off the road when he ran into a palmetto thicket, so he stopped and looked for a clear path.  But finding none, he started pushing his way through the waist-high tangle of brush.

When he stopped, he recalled later, he had first become aware of an odd odor.  He couldn’t exactly describe it to us, except to say that it was “sharp” or “pungent.”  It was very faint, actually more like a subconscious awareness at first.  Another sensation he recalled after the incident was a very slight difference in temperature, hardly perceivable, like walking by a brick building in the evening after the sun has set.  He hadn’t thought anything about either the odor or the heat at the time but later, when they became important, he remembered them.