There was a lull in the conversation, then the captain said, “Do you really want to get an opinion about flying saucers?”

I said I did.

“O.K.,” I remember his saying, “how much of a layover do you have in Chicago?”

I had about two hours.

“All right, as soon as we get to Chicago I’ll meet you at Caffarello’s, across the street from the terminal building.  I’ll see who else is in and I’ll bring them along.”

I thanked him and he went back up front.

I waited around the bar at Caffarello’s for an hour.  I’d just about decided that he wasn’t going to make it and that I’d better get back to catch my flight to Dayton when he and three other pilots came in.  We got a big booth in the coffee shop because he’d called three more off-duty pilots who lived in Chicago and they were coming over too.  I don’t remember any of the men’s names because I didn’t make any attempt to.  This was just an informal bull session and not an official interrogation, but I really got the scoop on what airline pilots think about UFO’s.

First of all they didn’t pull any punches about what they thought about the Air Force and its investigation of UFO reports.  One of the men got right down to the point:  “If I saw a flying saucer flying wing-tip formation with me and could see little men waving—­even if my whole load of passengers saw it—­I wouldn’t report it to the Air Force.”

Another man cut in, “Remember the thing Jack Adams said he saw down by Memphis?”

I said I did.

“He reported that to the Air Force and some red-hot character met him in Memphis on his next trip.  He talked to Adams a few minutes and then told him that he’d seen a meteor.  Adams felt like a fool.  Hell, I know Jack Adams well and he’s the most conservative guy I know.  If he said he saw something with glowing portholes, he saw something with glowing portholes—­and it wasn’t a meteor.”

Even though I didn’t remember the pilots’ names I’ll never forget their comments.  They didn’t like the way the Air Force had handled UFO reports and I was the Air Force’s “Mr. Flying Saucer.”  As quickly as one of the pilots would set me up and bat me down, the next one grabbed me off the floor and took his turn.  But I couldn’t complain too much; I’d asked for it.  I think that this group of seven pilots pretty much represented the feelings of a lot of the airline pilots.  They weren’t wide-eyed space fans, but they and their fellow pilots had seen something and whatever they’d seen weren’t hallucinations, mass hysteria, balloons, or meteors.

Three of the men at the Caffarello conference had seen UFO’s or, to use their terminology, they had seen something they couldn’t identify as a known object.  Two of these men had seen odd lights closely following their airplanes at night.  Both had checked and double-checked with CAA, but no other aircraft was in the area.  Both admitted, however, that they hadn’t seen enough to class what they’d seen as good UFO sighting.  But the third man had a lulu.