No—­Dr. La Paz didn’t think that they were meteors.

Dr. La Paz didn’t believe that they were meteorites either.

A meteorite is accompanied by sound and shock waves that break windows and stampede cattle.  Yet in every case of a green fireball sighting the observers reported that they did not hear any sound.

But the biggest mystery of all was the fact that no particles of a green fireball had ever been found.  If they were meteorites, Dr. La Paz was positive that he would have found one.  He’d missed very few times in the cases of known meteorites.  He pulled a map out of his file to show me what he meant.  It was a map that he had used to plot the spot where a meteorite had hit the earth.  I believe it was in Kansas.  The map had been prepared from information he had obtained from dozens of people who had seen the meteorite come flaming toward the earth.  At each spot where an observer was standing he’d drawn in the observer’s line of sight to the meteorite.  From the dozens of observers he had obtained dozens of lines of sight.  The lines all converged to give Dr. La Paz a plot of the meteorite’s downward trajectory.  Then he had been able to plot the spot where it had struck the earth.  He and his crew went to the marked area, probed the ground with long steel poles, and found the meteorite.

This was just one case that he showed me.  He had records of many more similar successful expeditions in his file.

Then he showed me some other maps.  The plotted lines looked identical to the ones on the map I’d just seen.  Dr. La Paz had used the same techniques on these plots and had marked an area where he wanted to search.  He had searched the area many times but he had never found anything.

These were plots of the path of a green fireball.

When Dr. La Paz had finished, I had one last question, “What do you think they are?”

He weighed the question for a few seconds—­then he said that all he cared to say was that he didn’t think that they were a natural phenomenon.  He thought that maybe someday one would hit the earth and the mystery would be solved.  He hoped that they were a natural phenomenon.

After my talk with Dr. La Paz I can well understand his apparent calmness on the night of September 18, 1954, when the newspaper reporter called him to find out if he planned to investigate this latest green fireball report.  He was speaking from experience, not indifference, when he said, “But I don’t expect to find anything.”

If the green fireballs are back, I hope that Dr. La Paz gets an answer this time.

The story of the UFO now goes back to late January 1949, the time when the Air Force was in the midst of the green fireball mystery.  In another part of the country another odd series of events was taking place.  The center of activity was a highly secret area that can’t be named, and the recipient of the UFO’s, which were formations of little lights, was the U.S.  Army.