We talked for about another hour, discussing the event and his background.  He kept asking, “What did I see?”—­evidently thinking that I knew.  He said that the newspapers were after him, since the sheriff’s office had inadvertently leaked the story, but that he had been stalling them off pending our arrival.  I told him it was Air Force policy to allow people to say anything they wanted to about a UFO sighting.  We had never muzzled anyone; it was his choice.  With that, we thanked him, arranged to pick up the cap and machete to take back to Dayton, and sent him home in a staff car.

By this time it was getting late, but I wanted to talk to the flight surgeon who had examined the man that morning.  The intelligence officer found him at the hospital and he said he would be right over.  His report was very thorough.  The only thing he could find out of the ordinary were minor burns on his arms and the back of his hands.  There were also indications that the inside of his nostrils might be burned.  The degree of burn could be compared to a light sunburn.  The hair had also been singed, indicating a flash heat.

The flight surgeon had no idea how this specifically could have happened.  It could have even been done with a cigarette lighter, and he took his lighter and singed a small area of his arm to demonstrate.  He had been asked only to make a physical check, so that is what he’d done, but he did offer a suggestion.  Check his Marine records; something didn’t ring true.  I didn’t quite agree; the story sounded good to me.

The next morning my crew from ATIC, three people from the intelligence office, and the two law officers went out to where the incident had taken place.  We found the spot where somebody had apparently been lying and the scoutmaster’s path through the thicket.  We checked the area with a Geiger counter, as a precautionary measure, not expecting to find anything; we didn’t.  We went over the area inch by inch, hoping to find a burned match with which a flare or fireworks could have been lighted, drippings from a flare, or anything that shouldn’t have been in a deserted area of woods.  We looked at the trees; they hadn’t been hit by lightning.  The blades of grass under which the UFO supposedly hovered were not burned.  We found nothing to contradict the story.  We took a few photos of the area and went back to town.  On the way back we talked to the constable and the deputy.  All they could do was to confirm what we’d heard.

We talked to the farmer and his wife, but they couldn’t help.  The few facts that the boy scouts had given them before they had a chance to talk to their scoutmaster correlated with his story.  We talked to the scoutmaster’s employer and some of his friends; he was a fine person.  We questioned people who might have been in a position to also observe something; they saw nothing.  The local citizens had a dozen theories, and we thoroughly checked each one.