On March 8 one of the best UFO sightings of 1950 took place right over ATIC.

About midmorning on this date a TWA airliner was coming in to land at the Dayton Municipal Airport.  As the pilot circled to get into the traffic pattern, he and his copilot saw a bright light hovering off to the southeast.  The pilot called the tower operators at the airport to tell them about the light, but before he could say anything, the tower operators told him they were looking at it too.  They had called the operations office of the Ohio Air National Guard, which was located at the airport, and while the tower operators were talking, an Air Guard pilot was running toward an F-51, dragging his parachute, helmet, and oxygen mask.

I knew the pilot, and he later told me, “I wanted to find out once and for all what these screwy flying saucer reports were all about.”

While the F-51 was warming up, the tower operators called ATIC and told them about the UFO and where to look to see it.  The people at ATIC rushed out and there it was—­an extremely bright light, much brighter and larger than a star.  Whatever it was, it was high because every once in a while it would be blanked out by the thick, high, scattered clouds that were in the area.  While the group of people were standing in front of ATIC watching the light, somebody ran in and called the radar lab at Wright Field to see if they had any radar “on the air.”  The people in the lab said that they didn’t have, but they could get operational in a hurry.  They said they would search southeast of the field with their radar and suggested that ATIC send some people over.  By the time the ATIC people arrived at the radar lab the radar was on the air and had a target in the same position as the light that everyone was looking at.  The radar was also picking up the Air Guard F-51 and an F-51 that had been scrambled from Wright-Patterson.  The pilots of the Air Guard ’51 and the Wright-Patterson ’51 could both see the UFO, and they were going after it.  The master sergeant who was operating the radar called the F-51’s on the radio, got them together and started to vector them toward the target.  As the two airplanes climbed they kept up a continual conversation with the radar operator to make sure they were all after the same thing.  For several minutes they could clearly see the UFO, but when they reached about 15,000 feet, the clouds moved in and they lost it.  The pilots made a quick decision; since radar showed that they were getting closer to the target, they decided to spread out to keep from colliding with one another and to go up through the clouds.  They went on instruments and in a few seconds they were in the cloud.  It was much worse than they’d expected; the cloud was thick, and the airplanes were icing up fast.  An F-51 is far from being a good instrument ship, but they stayed in their climb until radar called and said that they were close to the target; in fact, almost on it.  The pilots had another hurried