According to the old timers at ATIC, this report shook them worse than the Mantell Incident.  This was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to anything resembling a UFO to get a good look and live to tell about it.  A quick check on a map showed that the UFO that nearly collided with the airliner would have passed almost over Macon, Georgia, after passing the DC-3.  It had been turning toward Macon when last seen.  The story of the crew chief at Robins AFB, 200 miles away, seemed to confirm the sighting, not to mention the report from near the Virginia-North Carolina state line.

In intelligence, if you have something to say about some vital problem you write a report that is known as an “Estimate of the Situation.”  A few days after the DC-3 was buzzed, the people at ATIC decided that the time had arrived to make an Estimate of the Situation.  The situation was the UFO’s; the estimate was that they were interplanetary!

It was a rather thick document with a black cover and it was printed on legal-sized paper.  Stamped across the front were the words TOP SECRET.

It contained the Air Force’s analysis of many of the incidents I have told you about plus many similar ones.  All of them had come from scientists, pilots, and other equally credible observers, and each one was an unknown.

The document pointed out that the reports hadn’t actually started with the Arnold Incident.  Belated reports from a weather observer in Richmond, Virginia, who observed a “silver disk” through his theodolite telescope; an F-47 pilot and three pilots in his formation who saw a “silver flying wing,” and the English “ghost airplanes” that had been picked up on radar early in 1947 proved this point.  Although reports on them were not received until after the Arnold sighting, these incidents all had taken place earlier.

When the estimate was completed, typed, and approved, it started up through channels to higher-command echelons.  It drew considerable comment but no one stopped it on its way up.

A matter of days after the Estimate of the Situation was signed, sealed, and sent on its way, the third big sighting of 1948, Volume III of “The Classics,” took place.  The date was October 1, and the place was Fargo, North Dakota; it was the famous Gorman Incident, in which a pilot fought a “duel of death” with a UFO.

The pilot was George F. Gorman, a twenty-five-year-old second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard.

It was eight-thirty in the evening and Gorman was coming into Fargo from a cross-country flight.  He flew around Fargo for a while and about nine o’clock decided to land.  He called the control tower for landing instructions and was told that a Piper Cub was in the area.  He saw the Cub below him.  All of a sudden what appeared to be the taillight of another airplane passed him on his right.  He called the tower and complained but they assured him