All during December 1948 and January 1949 the green fireballs continued to invade the New Mexico skies.  Everyone, including the intelligence officers at Kirtland AFB, Air Defense Command people, Dr. La Paz, and some of the most distinguished scientists at Los Alamos had seen at least one.

In mid-February 1949 a conference was called at Los Alamos to determine what should be done to further pursue the investigation.  The Air Force, Project Sign, the intelligence people at Kirtland, and other interested parties had done everything they could think of and still no answer.

Such notable scientists as Dr. Joseph Kaplan, a world-renowned authority on the physics of the upper atmosphere, Dr. Edward Teller, of H-bomb fame, and of course Dr. La Paz, attended, along with a lot of military brass and scientists from Los Alamos.

This was one conference where there was no need to discuss whether or not this special type of UFO, the green fireball, existed.  Almost everyone at the meeting had seen one.  The purpose of the conference was to decide whether the fireballs were natural or man-made and how to find out more about them.

As happens in any conference, opinions were divided.  Some people thought the green fireballs were natural fireballs.  The proponents of the natural meteor, or meteorite, theory presented facts that they had dug out of astronomical journals.  Greenish-colored meteors, although not common, had been observed on many occasions.  The flat trajectory, which seemed to be so important in proving that the green fireballs were extraterrestrial, was also nothing new.  When viewed from certain angles, a meteor can appear to have a flat trajectory.  The reason that so many had been seen during December of 1948 and January of 1949 was that the weather had been unusually clear all over the Southwest during this period.

Dr. La Paz led the group who believed that the green fireballs were not meteors or meteorites.  His argument was derived from the facts that he had gained after many days of research and working with Air Force intelligence teams.  He stuck to the points that (1) the trajectory was too flat, (2) the color was too green, and (3) he couldn’t locate any fragments even though he had found the spots where they should have hit the earth if they were meteorites.

People who were at that meeting have told me that Dr. La Paz’s theory was very interesting and that each point was carefully considered.  But evidently it wasn’t conclusive enough because when the conference broke up, after two days, it was decided that the green fireballs were a natural phenomenon of some kind.  It was recommended that this phase of the UFO investigation be given to the Air Force’s Cambridge Research Laboratory, since it is the function of this group to study natural phenomena, and that Cambridge set up a project to attempt to photograph the green fireballs and measure their speed, altitude, and size.