radio conference and decided that since the weather was so bad they’d better come down.  If a UFO, or something, was in the clouds, they’d hit it before they could see it.  So they made a wise decision; they dropped the noses of their airplanes and dove back down into the clear.  They circled awhile but the clouds didn’t break.  In a few minutes the master sergeant on the radar reported that the target was fading fast.  The F-51’s went in and landed.

When the target faded on the radar, some of the people went outside to visually look for the UFO, but it was obscured by clouds, and the clouds stayed for an hour.  When it finally did clear for a few minutes, the UFO was gone.

A conference was held at ATIC that afternoon.  It included Roy James, ATIC’s electronics specialist and expert on radar UFO’s.  Roy had been over at the radar lab and had seen the UFO on the scope but neither the F-51 pilots nor the master sergeant who operated the radar were at the conference.  The records show that at this meeting a unanimous decision was reached as to the identity of the UFO’s.  The bright light was Venus since Venus was in the southeast during midmorning on March 8, 1950, and the radar return was caused by the ice-laden cloud that the F-51 pilots had encountered.  Ice-laden clouds can cause a radar return.  The group of intelligence specialists at the meeting decided that this was further proved by the fact that as the F-51’s approached the center of the cloud their radar return appeared to approach the UFO target on the radarscope.  They were near the UFO and near ice, so the UFO must have been ice.

The case was closed.

I had read the report of this sighting but I hadn’t paid too much attention to it because it had been “solved.”  But one day almost two years later I got a telephone call at my office at Project Blue Book.  It was a master sergeant, the master sergeant who had been operating the radar at the lab.  He’d just heard that the Air Force was again seriously investigating UFO’s and he wanted to see what had been said about the Dayton Incident.  He came over, read the report, and violently disagreed with what had been decided upon as the answer.  He said that he’d been working with radar before World War II; he’d helped with the operational tests on the first microwave warning radars developed early in the war by a group headed by Dr. Luis Alvarez.  He said that what he saw on that radarscope was no ice cloud; it was some type of aircraft.  He’d seen every conceivable type of weather target on radar, he told me; thunderstorms, ice-laden clouds, targets caused by temperature inversions, and the works.  They all had similar characteristics—­the target was “fuzzy” and varied in intensity.  But in this case the target was a good, solid return and he was convinced that it was caused by a good, solid object.  And besides, he said, when the target began to fade on his scope he had raised the tilt of the antenna and the target came back, indicating that whatever it was, it was climbing.  Ice-laden clouds don’t climb, he commented rather bitterly.