Editor Coyne summed up the feeling of hundreds of Kansans when he said:  “I have tended to discount the stories about flying objects, but, brother, I am now a believer.”

What was it?  First of all it was confusion.  Early the next morning Air Force investigators flooded the area asking the questions:  “What size was it in comparison to a key or a dime?” “Would it compare in size to a light bulb?” “Was there any noise?”

As soon as they left, the military tersely announced that no radar had picked up any target and no B-47’s had been sent out.  Then they pulled the plugs on the incoming phone lines.  The confusion mounted when newsmen tapped their private sources and learned that a B-47 had been sent into the area.

A few days later the Air Force told the Kansans what they’d seen:  The reflection from burning waste gas torches in a local oil field.

This was greeted with the Kansan version of the Bronx Cheer.

Nineteen hundred fifty-six was a big year for Project Blue Book.  According to an old friend, Captain George Gregory, who was then Chief of Blue Book, they received 778 reports.  And through a lot of sleepless nights they were able to “solve” 97.8% of them.  Only 17 remained “unknowns.”

Digging through the reports for 1956, outside of the ones already mentioned, there were few real good ones.

In Banning, California, Ground Observer Corps spotters watched a “balloon-like object make three rectangular circuits around the town.”  In Plymouth, New Hampshire, two GOC spotters reported “a bright yellow object which left a trail, similar to a jet, moving slowly at a very high altitude.”  At Rosebury, Oregon, State Police received many reports of “funny green and red lights” moving slowly around a television transmitter tower.  And in Hartford, Connecticut, two amateur astronomers, looking at Saturn through a 4-inch telescope, were distracted by a bright light.  Turning their telescope on it they observed a “large, whitish yellow light, shaped like a ten gallon hat.”  Many other people evidently saw the same UFO because the local newspaper said, “reports have been pouring in.”

In Miami, a Pan American Airlines radar operator tracked a UFO at speeds up to 4000 miles an hour.  Five of his skeptical fellow radar operators watched and were confirmed.

At Moneymore, Northern Ireland, a “level-headed and God fearing” citizen and his wife captured an 18-inch saucer by putting a headlock on it.  They started to the local police station, but put the saucer down to climb over a hedge, and it went whirling off to the hinterlands of space.

The 27th Air Defense Division that guards the vast aircraft and missile centers of Southern California was alerted on the night of September 9.  In rapid succession, a Western Airlines pilot making an approach to Los Angeles International Airport, the Ground Observer Corps, and numerous Los Angeles citizens called in a white light moving slowly across the Los Angeles basin.  When the big defense radars on San Clemente Island picked up an unknown target in the same area that the light was being reported two F-89 jet interceptors were scrambled but saw nothing.