At 5:14 the target went off the scope to the north.

At 5:16 it was back and the la.s.situde was instantly gone. Now the target was 22 miles _south_ of the ship. No one in the CIC had to draw a picture. Something, in two minutes, had disappeared off the scope to the north, made a big swing around the ship, out of radar range, and had swung in from the south!

Word went up to the lookouts. They tensed up and began to scan the sky.

The radar contacts continued.

This second contact, south of the ship, was held for two full minutes as the target moved out from 22 to 55 miles. Then it faded.

At 5:20 the target was back but now it was _north_ of the ship again, and it was hovering!

Again the lookouts were called. Could they see anything now? Their "No" answers didn"t hold for long because seconds later their terse reports began to come into the CIC. A "brilliant light, like a planet" was streaking across the northwest sky about 30 degrees above the horizon. Unfortunately the radar had lost contact for a moment when the visual report came in.

At 5:37 the target disappeared from the scopes and was gone for good.

The _Seabago_ Case was ended but the UFO"s continued to fly.

Reports continued to come into the Air Force and a lot of investigators lost a lot of sleep.

The next day at 3:50P.M. the C.O. of an Air Force weather detachment at Long Beach, California, and twelve airmen watched six saucer- shaped UFO"s streak along _under_ the bases of a 7000 foot high cloud deck.

On the same day, also in Long Beach, officers and men at the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station saw UFO"s almost continuously between the hours of 6:05 and 7:25P.M.

Long Beach police reported "well over a hundred calls" during this same period.

During November and December of 1957 it was a situation of you name the city and there was a UFO report from there. Trying to sift them out and put them in a book would be like sorting out a plateful of spaghetti. And if you succeeded you would have a doc.u.ment the size of the New York City telephone directory.

Most of the reports were explained.

The Levelland, Texas, sightings were written off as "St. Elmo"s Fire." The military police at the White Sands Proving Ground saw the moon through broken clouds and the crew of the Coast Guard ship _Seabago_ were actually tracking several separate aircraft.

The 1957 flap was as great as the previous record breaking 1952 flap. During 1957 the Air Force received 1178 UFO reports. Of these, only 20 were placed on the "unknown" list.

In comparison to 1957, the first months of 1958 were a doldrums.

Reports drifted in at a leisurely pace and the Air Force UFO investigating teams, blooded during the avalanche of 1957, picked off solutions like knocking off clay pipes in a shooting gallery.

In Los Angeles, a few clear nights drove the Air Defense Command nuts. People could actually see the sky and the sight of so many stars frightened them.

Unusual atmospherics in Georgia made stars jump and radars go crazy; and a balloon, hanging over Chicago at dusk, cost the taxpayers another several thousand dollars but the pilots made their flight pay.

A statement by Dr. Carl Jung, renowned Swiss psychologist, was widely publicized in July 1958. Dr. Jung was quoted as saying, in a letter to a U.S. saucer club, "UFO"s are real." When Dr. Jung read what he was supposed to have written the Alps rang with screams of "misquote."

No one got excited until the early morning of September 29th.

Shortly before dawn on that day a confusing mess of reports began to pour into the Air Force. Some came from the Washington, D.C., area.

People right in NICAP"s backyard told of seeing a "large, round, fiery object" shoot across the sky from southeast to northwest. A few excited observers, all from the country northwest of Washington, "had seen it land" and even as they telephoned in their reports they could see it glowing behind a neighbor"s barn.

Other reports, also of a "huge, round, fiery object," came in from such places as Pittsburgh, Somerset, and Bedford, all in Pennsylvania; and Hagerstown and Frederick in Maryland. To add to the confusion, people in Pennsylvania reported seeing three objects "flying in formation."

When the dust settled Air Force investigators took the first step in the solution of any UFO report. They plotted the sightings on a map, and collated the directions of flight, descriptions and times of observation. It was obvious that the object had moved along a line between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. It was traveling about 7000 miles an hour and everyone had obviously seen the same object. By the time it had pa.s.sed into Pennsylvania it had split into three objects.

But the hooker was the reported landings northeast of Washington.

Too many people had reported a glow on the ground to write this factor off even though an investigator, dispatched to the scene shortly after dawn, had found nothing in the way of evidence.

One possibility was that some unknown object had streaked across the sky, landed and then took off again.

Could be, but it wasn"t.

The next night the case broke. The glow from the landing was a bright floodlight on a barn. No one had ever really noticed it before until the object pa.s.sed nearby.

A few days later the object itself was identified. From the many identical descriptions Project Blue Book"s astrophysicist pinned it down as a large meteor. The meteor had broken up near the end of its flight to produce the illusion of three objects flying in formation.

Of all the 590 UFO reports the Air Force received in 1958, probably the weirdest was solved before it was ever reported.

About four o"clock on the afternoon of October 2, 1958, three men were standing in a group, talking, outside a tungsten mill at Danby, California, right in the heart of the Mojave Desert The men had been talking for about five minutes when one of them, who happened to be facing the northwest, stopped right in the middle of a sentence and pointed. The other two men looked and to their astonishment saw a brilliant glow of light. It was so close to the horizon that it was difficult to tell if it was on the horizon or in the air just above it.

At first the men ignored the light but as it persisted they became more interested. They"d all heard "flying saucer" stories and, they later admitted, this possibility entered their minds.

As they watched they speculated. It could be something natural but all of them had been around this area for months and they"d never seen this light before. About the time they decided to get a telescope and take a closer look the light suddenly faded.

All the next day the men kept glancing off toward the northwest as they worked but the clear blue sky was blank. Then, at 4:00P.M., the light was back. This time they had a telescope.

All the men took turns looking at the object and all agreed that it was about 15 feet long, 5 feet high and solid. It looked like the sun reflecting off shiny metal. It was about four miles away, they estimated, and almost exactly on the horizon.

Now the men"s curiosity was thoroughly whetted. Martian s.p.a.ceship or whatever, they were going after it. But a several-hour search of the area produced nothing. And, as soon as they left the mill they lost sight of the object.

Darkness brought the search to a halt.

The next day at 4:00P.M. a crowd had gathered and the UFO kept its appointment. Again the men studied the object and tension ran high.

Someone had resurrected the stories of UFO"s landing in the desert.

At the time they"d sounded absurd but now, standing there looking at a UFO, it was different.

A party of men were all ready to jeep out into the desert to make another search when one of them made a discovery. There were guy wires coming out of the UFO and running down into the trees. Other people looked. And then the solution hit like a fireball.

Exactly in line with the UFO, and ten miles away, not four, was a set of antennas for the California State Highway Patrol radio. The sun"s rays were reflecting from these antennas. They"d never seen this before because on only a few days during the year was the sun at exactly the right angle to produce the reflection.

The men were right. In a few days the Danby UFO left and it never came back.

Nineteen hundred fifty-eight was not a record year for UFO"s. The 590 reports received didn"t stack up to the 1178 for 1957, or the 778 for 1956, or the 918 for 1952. But a new record was set when the percentage of unknowns was pared down to a new low. During 1958 only 9/10 of one per cent of the reports, or 5 reports, were cla.s.sified as "unknown."

More manpower, better techniques, and just plain old experience has allowed the Air Force to continually lower the percentage of "unknowns" from 20%, while I was in charge of Project Blue Book, to less than 1%, today.

No story of the UFO would be complete without describing one of these unknowns, so here"s one exactly as it came out of the Project Blue Book files:

"On 31 October 1958, this Center received a TWX reporting an UFO near Lock Raven Dam. A request for a detailed investigation was sent to the nearest Air Force Base. The following is a summary of the incident and subsequent investigation:

"Two civilians were driving around near Lock Raven Dam on the evening of 26 October 1958. When they rounded a curve about 200 to 300 yards from a bridge they saw what appeared to be a large, flat, egg shaped object hovering about 100 to 150 feet above the bridge superstructure. They slowed their car and when they got to within 75 or 80 feet of the bridge their engine quit and their lights went out.

The driver immediately stepped on the brakes and stopped the car.