Since he’d gone this far, he decided that he’d get closer and make sure it was an airplane; so he dropped the nose of the F-86 and started down.  As the needle on the machmeter nudged the red line, he saw that he was getting closer because the light was getting bigger, but still he couldn’t see any lights other than the one big white one.  Then it wasn’t white any longer; it was changing color.  In about a two-second cycle it changed from white to red, then back to white again.  It went through this cycle two or three times, and then before he could realize what was going on, he told me, the light changed in shape to a perfect triangle.  Then it split into two triangles, one above the other.  By this time he had leveled off and wasn’t closing in any more.  In a flash the whole thing was gone.  He used the old standard description for a disappearing UFO:  “It was just like someone turning off a light—­it’s there, then it’s gone.”

I asked him what he thought he’d seen.  He’d thought about flying saucers, he said, but he “just couldn’t swallow those stories.”  He thought he had a case of vertigo and the more he thought about it, the surer he was that this was the answer.  He’d felt pretty foolish, he told me, and he was glad that he was alone.

Up ahead he saw the sprawling lights of Fort Benning and Lawson AFB, his turning point on the flight, and he’d started to turn but then he’d checked his fuel.  The climb had used up quite a bit, so he changed his mind about going to Robins AFB and started straight back to Moody.

He called in to the ground station to change his flight plan, but before he could say anything the ground radio operator asked him if he’d seen a mysterious light.

Well—­he’d seen a light.

Then the ground operator proceeded to tell him that the UFO chase had been watched on radar.  First the radar had the UFO target on the scope, and it was a UFO because it was traveling much too slowly to be an airplane.  Then the radar operators saw the F-86 approach, climb, and make a shallow dive toward the UFO.  At first the F-86 had closed in on the UFO, but then the UFO had speeded up just enough to maintain a comfortable lead.  This went on for two or three minutes; then it had moved off the scope at a terrific speed.  The radar site had tried to call him, the ground station told the F-86 pilot, but they couldn’t raise him so the message had to be relayed through the tower.

Rack up two more points for the UFO—­another unknown and another confirmed believer.

Two or three weeks after the meeting of the panel of scientists in Washington I received word that Project Blue Book would follow the recommendations that the panel had made.  I was to start implementing the plan right away.  Our proposal for setting up instruments had gone to the Pentagon weeks before, so that was already taken care of.  We needed more people, so I drew up a new organizational cable that called for more investigators and analysts and sent it through to ATIC’s personnel section.