The fireball activity on the night of December 5 was made to order for plotting flight paths.  The good reports of that night included carefully noted locations, the directions in which the green objects were seen, their heights above the horizon, and the times when they were observed.  So early the next morning Dr. La Paz and a crew of intelligence officers were scouring northern New Mexico.  They started out by talking to the people who had made reports but soon found out that dozens of other people had also seen the fireballs.  By closely checking the time of the observations, they determined that eight separate fireballs had been seen.  One was evidently more spectacular and was seen by the most people.  Everyone in northern New Mexico had seen it going from west to east, so Dr. La Paz and his crew worked eastward across New Mexico to the west border of Texas, talking to dozens of people.  After many sleepless hours they finally plotted where it should have struck the earth.  They searched the area but found nothing.  They went back over the area time and time again—­ nothing.  As Dr. La Paz later told me, this was the first time that he seriously doubted the green fireballs were meteorites.

Within a few more days the fireballs were appearing almost nightly.  The intelligence officers from Kirtland decided that maybe they could get a good look at one of them, so on the night of December 8 two officers took off in an airplane just before dark and began to cruise around north of Albuquerque.  They had a carefully worked out plan where each man would observe certain details if they saw one of the green fireballs.  At 6:33P.M. they saw one.  This is their report: 

At 6:33P.M. while flying at an indicated altitude of 11,500 feet, a strange phenomenon was observed.  Exact position of the aircraft at time of the observation was 20 miles east of the Las Vegas, N.M., radio range station.  The aircraft was on a compass course of 90 degrees.  Capt. ------ was pilot and I was acting as copilot.  I first observed the object and a split second later the pilot saw it.  It was 2,000 feet higher than the plane, and was approaching the plane at a rapid rate of speed from 30 degrees to the left of our course.  The object was similar in appearance to a burning green flare, the kind that is commonly used in the Air Force.  However, the light was much more intense and the object appeared considerably larger than a normal flare.  The trajectory of the object, when first sighted, was almost flat and parallel to the earth.  The phenomenon lasted about 2 seconds.  At the end of this time the object seemed to begin to burn out and the trajectory then dropped off rapidly.  The phenomenon was of such intensity as to be visible from the very moment it ignited.

Back at Wright-Patterson AFB, ATIC was getting a blow-by-blow account of the fireball activity but they were taking no direct part in the investigation.  Their main interest was to review all incoming UFO reports and see if the green fireball reports were actually unique to the Albuquerque area.  They were.  Although a good many UFO reports were coming in from other parts of the U.S., none fit the description of the green fireballs.