Few people I ever talked to, once they had decided they were looking at a UFO, stopped to calmly say to themselves, “Now couldn’t this be a balloon, star, planet, or something else explainable?”

In one instance I traveled halfway across the United States to investigate a report made by a high ranking man in the State Department.  An experienced observer.  It was evening by the time I got to talk to him and after he’d excitedly told me all the pertinent facts, how this bright fight had “jumped across the sky,” he said, “Want to see it?  It’s still there but it’s not jumping now.”

We went outside and there was Jupiter.

Then, there was the UFO over Dayton, Ohio, in the summer of 1952.

I first heard about it at home.  It was about six in the evening when the phone rang and it was one of the tower operators at Patterson Field.

The tower operators at Lockbourne AFB in Columbus, Ohio, 60 miles east of Dayton, had spotted “three fiery spheres flying in a V-formation” over their base.  Two F-84’s had been scrambled to intercept and they were in the air right now.  So far, the tower operator told me, the intercept had been unsuccessful because the objects were traveling “two to three thousand miles an hour” and were too high for the old F-84’s.

He was monitoring the two jets’ radio conversation and he put his telephone near the speaker.

I heard: 

“At 28,000 and still above us.”

“High speed.”

“Headed toward Wright-Patterson.”

“Low on fuel, going home.”

I made it to my car in record time and took off toward Wright-Patterson, about twelve miles from where I was living.

It was still light, although the sun was low, and as I drove I kept looking toward the east.  Nothing.  I reached the gate, showed my pass to the guard, and had just written the whole thing off as another UFO report when I saw them.

They convinced me.

Off to the east of the airbase were three objects that can best be described as three half-sized suns.

By the time I arrived at base operations there were three or four dozen people on the ramp, all looking up.

The standard comment was:  “Look at them go.”

About this time a C-54 transport taxied up and stopped.  It was the “Kittyhawk Flight” from Washington and I knew several people who got off.

One passenger, an officer from ATIC, ran up to me and handed me a roll of film.

“Here’s some pictures of them,” he said breathlessly.  “I never thought I’d see one.”

The next passengers I recognized were two other officers, Ph.D. psychologists from the Aero Medical Laboratory.  I knew them because they had visited Blue Book many times collecting data for a paper they were writing on UFO’s.

The title of the paper was to be:  The Psychological Aspects of UFO Sightings.