Nor did the pilot of one of the F-51’s agree with the ATIC analysis.  The pilot who had been leading the two-ship flight of F-51’s on that day told me that what he saw was no planet.  While he and his wing man were climbing, and before the clouds obscured it, they both got a good look at the UFO, and it was getting bigger and more distinct all the time.  As they climbed, the light began to take on a shape; it was definitely round.  And if it had been Venus it should have been in the same part of the sky the next day, but the pilot said that he’d looked and it wasn’t there.  The ATIC report doesn’t mention this point.

I remember asking him a second time what the UFO looked like; he said, “huge and metallic”—­shades of the Mantell Incident.

The Dayton Incident didn’t get much of a play from the press because officially it wasn’t an unknown and there’s nothing intriguing about an ice cloud and Venus.  There were UFO reports in the newspapers, however.

One story that was widely printed was about a sighting at the naval air station at Dallas, Texas.  Just before noon on March 16, Chief Petty Officer Charles Lewis saw a disk-shaped UFO come streaking across the sky and buzz a high-flying B-36.  Lewis first saw the UFO coming in from the north, lower than the B-36; then he saw it pull up to the big bomber as it got closer.  It hovered under the B-36 for an instant, then it went speeding off and disappeared.  When the press inquired about the incident, Captain M. A. Nation, commander of the air station, vouched for his chief and added that the base tower operators had seen and reported a UFO to him about ten days before.

This story didn’t run long because the next day a bigger one broke when the sky over the little town of Farmington, New Mexico, about 170 miles northwest of Albuquerque, was literally invaded by UFO’s.  Every major newspaper carried the story.  The UFO’s had apparently been congregating over the four corners area for two days because several people had reported seeing UFO’s on March 15 and 16.  But the seventeenth was the big day, every saucer this side of Polaris must have made a successful rendezvous over Farmington, because on that day most of the town’s 3,600 citizens saw the mass fly-by.  The first reports were made at 10:15A.M.; then for an hour the air was full of flying saucers.  Estimates of the number varied from a conservative 500 to “thousands.”  Most all the observers said the UFO’s were saucer-shaped, traveled at almost unbelievable speeds, and didn’t seem to have any set flight path.  They would dart in and out and seemed to avoid collisions only by inches.  There was no doubt that they weren’t hallucinations because the mayor, the local newspaper staff, ex-pilots, the highway patrol, and every type of person who makes up a community of 3,600 saw them.