the winds at lower levels.  One man was watching the balloon through a theodolite, an instrument similar to a surveyor’s transit built around a 25-power telescope, one man was holding a stop watch, and a third had a clipboard to record the measured data.  The crew had tracked the balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly shouted and pointed off to the left.  The whole crew looked at the part of the sky where the man was excitedly pointing, and there was a UFO.  “It didn’t appear to be large,” one of the scientists later said, “but it was plainly visible.  It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape and had a ‘whitish-silver color.’” After taking a split second to realize what they were looking at, one of the men swung the theodolite around to pick up the object, and the timer reset his stop watch.  For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it moved toward the east.  In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped from an angle of elevation of 45 degrees to 25 degrees, then it zoomed upward and in a few seconds it was out of sight.  The crew heard no sound and the New Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard “a whisper a mile away.”

When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second.  At one time during the observed portion of its flight, the UFO had passed in front of a range of mountains that were visible to the observers.  Using this as a check point, they estimated the size of the UFO to be 40 feet wide and 100 feet long, and they computed that the UFO had been at an altitude of 296,000 feet, or 56 miles, when they had first seen it, and that it was traveling 7 miles per second.

This wasn’t the only UFO sighting made by White Sands scientists.  On April 5, 1948, another team watched a UFO for several minutes as it streaked across the afternoon sky in a series of violent maneuvers.  The disk-shaped object was about a fifth the size of a full moon.

On another occasion the crew of a C-47 that was tracking a skyhook balloon saw two similar UFO’s come loping in from just above the horizon, circle the balloon, which was flying at just under 90,000 feet, and rapidly leave.  When the balloon was recovered it was ripped.

I knew the two pilots of the C-47; both of them now believe in flying saucers.  And they aren’t alone; so do the people of the Aeronautical Division of General Mills who launch and track the big skyhook balloons.  These scientists and engineers all have seen UFO’s and they aren’t their own balloons.  I was almost tossed out of the General Mills offices into a cold January Minneapolis snowstorm for suggesting such a thing—­but that comes later in our history of the UFO.