When the airliner landed in Omaha, the crew filed a report that was forwarded to the Air Force.  But this wasn’t the only report that was filed; a full colonel from military intelligence had been a passenger on the DC-3.  He’d seen the UFO too, and he was mighty impressed.

I thought that this was an interesting report and I wondered what the official reaction would be.  The official reaction was a great big, deep belly laugh.

This puzzled me because I’d read that the Air Force was seriously investigating all UFO reports.

I continued to eavesdrop on the discussions about the report all day since the UFO expert was about to “investigate” the incident.  He sent out a wire to Flight Service and found that there was a B-36 somewhere in the area of Sioux City at the time of the sighting, and from what I could gather he was trying to blame the sighting on the B-36.  When Washington called to get the results of the analysis of the sighting, they must have gotten the B-36 treatment because the case was closed.

I’d only been at ATIC two days and I certainly didn’t class myself as an intelligence expert, but it didn’t take an expert to see that a B-36, even one piloted by an experienced idiot, could not do what the UFO had done—­buzz a DC-3 that was in an airport traffic pattern.

I didn’t know it at the time but a similar event had occurred the year before.  On the night of May 29, 1950, the crew of an American Airlines DC-6 had just taken off from Washington National Airport, and they were about seven miles west of Mount Vernon when the copilot suddenly looked out and yelled, “Watch it—­watch it.”  The pilot and the engineer looked out to see a bluish-white light closing in on them from dead ahead.  The pilot racked the DC-6 up in a tight right turn while the UFO passed by on the left “from eleven to seven o’clock” and a little higher than the airliner.  During this time the UFO passed between the full moon and DC-6 and the crew could see the dark silhouette of a “wingless B-29.”  Its length was about half the diameter of the full moon, and it had a blue flame shooting out the tail end.

Seconds after the UFO had passed by the DC-6, the copilot looked out and there it was again, apparently flying formation off their right wing.  Then in a flash of blue flame it was gone—­streaking out ahead of the airliner and making a left turn toward the coast.

The pilot of the DC-6, who made the report, had better than 15,000 hours’ flying time.

I didn’t hear anything about UFO’s, or flying saucers, as they were then known, for several weeks but I kept them in mind and one day I asked one of the old hands at ATIC about them—­specifically I wanted to know about the Sioux City Incident.  Why had it been sloughed off so lightly?  His answer was typical of the official policy at that time.  “One of these days all of these crazy pilots will kill themselves, the crazy people on the ground will be locked up, and there won’t be any more flying saucer reports.”