Everyone who was familiar with the incident, except a few people in the Pentagon, were convinced that this was a hoax until the lab called me about the grass samples we’d sent in.  “How did the roots get charred?” Roots charred?  I didn’t even know what my caller was talking about.  He explained that when they’d examined the grass they had knocked the dirt and sand off the roots of the grass clumps and found them charred.  The blades of grass themselves were not damaged; they had never been heated, except on the extreme tips of the longer blades.  These had evidently been bending over touching the ground and were also charred.  The lab had duplicated the charring and had found that by placing live grass clumps in a pan of sand and dirt and heating it to about 300 degrees F. over a gas burner the charring could be duplicated.  How it was actually done outside the lab they couldn’t even guess.

As soon as we got the lab report, we checked a few possibilities ourselves.  There were no hot underground springs to heat the earth, no chemicals in the soil, not a thing we found could explain it.  The only way it could have been faked would have been to heat the earth from underneath to 300 degrees F., and how do you do this without using big and cumbersome equipment and disturbing the ground?  You can’t.  Only a few people handled the grass specimens:  the lab, the intelligence officer in Florida, and I. The lab wouldn’t do it as a joke, then write an official report, and I didn’t do it.  This leaves the intelligence officer; I’m positive that he wouldn’t do it.  There may be a single answer everyone is overlooking, but as of now the charred grass roots from Florida are still a mystery.

Writing an official report on this incident was difficult.  On one side of the ledger was a huge mass of circumstantial evidence very heavily weighted against the scoutmaster’s story being true.  On our second trip to Florida, Lieutenant Olsson and I heard story after story about the man’s aptitude for dreaming up tall tales.  One man told us, “If he told me the sun was shining, I’d look up to make sure.”  There were parts of his story and those of the boy scouts that didn’t quite mesh.  None of us ever believed the boy scouts were in on the hoax.  They were undoubtedly so impressed by the story that they imagined a few things they didn’t actually see.  The scoutmaster’s burns weren’t proof of anything; the flight surgeon had duplicated these by burning his own arm with a cigarette lighter.  But we didn’t make step one in proving the incident to be a hoax.  We thought up dozens of ways that the man could have set up the hoax but couldn’t prove one.

In the scoutmaster’s favor were the two pieces of physical evidence we couldn’t explain, the holes burned in the cap and the charred grass roots.

The deputy sheriff who had first told me about the scoutmaster’s Marine and prison record had also said, “Maybe this is the one time in his life he’s telling the truth, but I doubt it.”