In a minute or two the F-84 was airborne and the controller was working him toward the light.  The pilot saw it right away and closed in.  Again the light began to climb out, this time more toward the northeast.  The pilot also began to climb, and before long the light, which at first had been about 30 degrees above his horizontal line of sight, was now below him.  He nosed the ’84 down to pick up speed, but it was the same old story—­as soon as he’d get within 3 miles of the UFO, it would put on a burst of speed and stay out ahead.

Even though the pilot could see the light and hear the ground controller telling him that he was above it, and alternately gaining on it or dropping back, he still couldn’t believe it—­there must be a simple explanation.  He turned off all of his lights—­it wasn’t a reflection from any of the airplane’s lights because there it was.  A reflection from a ground light, maybe.  He rolled the airplane—­the position of the light didn’t change.  A star—­he picked out three bright stars near the light and watched carefully.  The UFO moved in relation to the three stars.  Well, he thought to himself, if it’s a real object out there, my radar should pick it up too; so he flipped on his radar-ranging gunsight.  In a few seconds the red light on his sight blinked on—­something real and solid was in front of him.  Then he was scared.  When I talked to him, he readily admitted that he’d been scared.  He’d met MD 109’s, FW 190’s and ME 262’s over Germany and he’d met MIG-15’s over Korea but the large, bright, bluish-white light had scared him—­he asked the controller if he could break off the intercept.

This time the light didn’t come back.

When the UFO went off the scope it was headed toward Fargo, North Dakota, so the controller called the Fargo filter center.  “Had they had any reports of unidentified lights?” he asked.  They hadn’t.

But in a few minutes a call came back.  Spotter posts on a southwest-northeast line a few miles west of Fargo had reported a fast-moving, bright bluish-white light.

This was an unknown—­the best.

The sighting was thoroughly investigated, and I could devote pages of detail on how we looked into every facet of the incident; but it will suffice to say that in every facet we looked into we saw nothing.  Nothing but a big question mark asking what was it.

When I left Project Blue Book and the Air Force I severed all official associations with the UFO.  But the UFO is like hard drink; you always seem to drift back to it.  People I’ve met, people at work, and friends of friends are continually asking about the subject.  In the past few months the circulation manager of a large Los Angeles newspaper, one of Douglas Aircraft Company’s top scientists, a man who is guiding the future development of the supersecret Atlas intercontinental guided missile, a movie star, and a German rocket expert have called me and wanted to get together to talk about UFO’s.  Some of them had seen one.