CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Digesting the Data

It was soon after we had written a finis to the Case of the Scoutmaster that I went into Washington to give another briefing on the latest UFO developments.  Several reports had come in during early August that had been read with a good deal of interest in the military and other governmental agencies.  By late August 1952 several groups in Washington were following the UFO situation very closely.

The sighting that had stirred everyone up came from Haneda AFB, now Tokyo International Airport, in Japan.  Since the sighting came from outside the U.S., we couldn’t go out and investigate it, but the intelligence officers in the Far East Air Force had done a good job, so we had the complete story of this startling account of an encounter with a UFO.  Only a few minor questions had been unanswered, and a quick wire to FEAF brought back these missing data.  Normally it took up to three months to get routine questions back and forth, but this time the exchange of wires took only a matter of hours.

Several months after the sighting I talked to one of the FEAF intelligence officers who had investigated it, and in his estimation it was one of the best to come out of the Far East.

The first people to see the UFO were two control tower operators who were walking across the ramp at the air base heading toward the tower to start the midnight shift.  They were about a half hour early so they weren’t in any big hurry to get up into the tower—­at least not until they saw a large brilliant light off to the northeast over Tokyo Bay.  They stopped to look at the light for a few seconds thinking that it might be an exceptionally brilliant star, but both men had spent many lonely nights in a control tower when they had nothing to look at except stars and they had never seen anything this bright before.  Besides, the light was moving.  The two men had lined it up with the corner of a hangar and could see that it was continually moving closer and drifting a little off to the right.

In a minute they had run across the ramp, up the several hundred steps to the tower, and were looking at the light through 7x50 binoculars.  Both of the men, and the two tower operators whom they were relieving, got a good look at the UFO.  The light was circular in shape and had a constant brilliance.  It appeared to be the upper portion of a large, round, dark shape which was about four times the diameter of the light itself.  As they watched, the UFO moved in closer, or at least it appeared to be getting closer because it became more distinct.  When it moved in, the men could see a second and dimmer light on the lower edge of the dark, shadowy portion.

In a few minutes the UFO had moved off to the east, getting dimmer and dimmer as it disappeared.  The four tower men kept watching the eastern sky, and suddenly the light began to reappear.  It stayed in sight a few seconds, was gone again, and then for the third time it came back, heading toward the air base.