Twenty-five minutes later the pilot of a T-33 jet trainer, carrying an Air Force major as passenger and flying 20,000 feet over Point Pleasant, New Jersey, spotted a dull silver, disklike object far below him.  He described it as 30 to 50 feet in diameter and as descending toward Sandy Hook from an altitude of a mile or so.  He banked the T-33 over and started down after it.  As he shot down, he reported, the object stopped its descent, hovered, then sped south, made a 120-degree turn, and vanished out to sea.

The Fort Monmouth Incident then switched back to the radar group.  At 3:15P.M. they got an excited, almost frantic call from headquarters to pick up a target high and to the north—­which was where the first “faster-than-a-jet” object had vanished—­and to pick it up in a hurry.  They got a fix on it and reported that it was traveling slowly at 93,000 feet.  They also could see it visually as a silver speck.

What flies 18 miles above the earth?

The next morning two radar sets picked up another target that couldn’t be tracked automatically.  It would climb, level off, climb again, go into a dive.  When it climbed it went almost straight up.

The two-day sensation ended that afternoon when the radar tracked another unidentified slow-moving object and tracked it for several minutes.

A copy of the message had also gone to Washington.  Before Jerry could digest the thirty-six inches of facts, ATIC’s new chief, Colonel Frank Dunn, got a phone call.  It came from the office of the Director of Intelligence of the Air Force, Major General (now Lieutenant General) C. P. Cabell.  General Cabell wanted somebody from ATIC to get to New Jersey—­fast—­and find out what was going on.  As soon as the reports had been thoroughly investigated, the general said that he wanted a complete personal report.  Nothing expedites like a telephone call from a general officer, so in a matter of hours Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel N. R. Rosengarten were on an airliner, New Jersey-bound.

The two officers worked around the clock interrogating the radar operators, their instructors, and the technicians at Fort Monmouth.  The pilot who had chased the UFO in the T-33 trainer and his passenger were flown to New York, and they talked to Cummings and Rosengarten.  All other radar stations in the area were checked, but their radars hadn’t picked up anything unusual.

At about 4:00A.M. the second morning after they had arrived, the investigation was completed, Cummings later told.  He and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten couldn’t get an airliner out of New York in time to get them to the Pentagon by 10:00A.M., the time that had been set up for their report, so they chartered an airplane and flew to the capital to brief the general.

General Cabell presided over the meeting, and it was attended by his entire staff plus Lieutenant Cummings, Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten, and a special representative from Republic Aircraft Corporation.  The man from Republic supposedly represented a group of top U.S. industrialists and scientists who thought that there should be a lot more sensible answers coming from the Air Force regarding the UFO’s.  The man was at the meeting at the personal request of a general officer.