Part 22 (1/2)

The next day Dayton had its first UFO sighting in a long time when a Mr Roy T Ellis, president of the Rubber Seal Products Company, and many other people, reported a teardrop-shaped object that hovered over Dayton for severaltwist because two years later I was in Dayton and stopped in at ATIC to see a friend who is one of the technical advisers at the center

Naturally the conversation got around to the subject of UFO's, and he askedI did, so he went on to say that he and his wife had seen this UFO that night but they had never told anybody He was very serious when he admitted that he had no idea what it could have been Now I'd heard this state fro because he was as anti-saucer as anyone I knew Then he added, ”From that time on I didn't think your saucer reporters were as crazy as I used to think they were”

The Dayton sighting also created quite a stir in the press In conjunction with the sighting, the Dayton Daily _Journal_ had interviewed Colonel Richard H Magee, the Dayton-Oakwood civil defense director; they wanted to knohat he thought about the UFO's The colonel's answeraround in our skies and e knehat it was”

When the story broke in other papers, the colonel's affiliation with civil defense wasn't mentioned, and he became merely ”a colonel from Dayton” Dayton was quickly construed by the public to ht- Patterson AFB and specifically ATIC Soleefully clapped their hands The gleeful handclaps were fronized, and they believed that if they couldn't talk their ideas into being they ht be able to force them in with the help of this type of publicity

The te that Project Blue Book had experienced in early July proved to be only the cal about twenty reports a day plus frantic calls froence officers all over the United States as every Air Force installation in the US was being swaence officers to send in the ones that sounded the best

The build-up in UFO reports wasn't limited to the United States-- every day ould receive reports froland and France led the field, with the South A a close third Needless to say, we didn't investigate or evaluate foreign reports because we had our hands full right at ho in fourteen hours a day, six days a week It wasn't at all uncommon for Lieutenant Andy Flues, Bob Olsson, or Kerry Rothstien,out or coation TWA airliners out of Dayton wereyet

All the reports that were coood ones, ones with no answers Unknoere running about 40 percent Rumors persist that in mid-July 1952 the Air Force was braced for an expected invasion by flying saucers Had these ruht that the invasion was already in full swing And they would have thought that one of the beachheads for the invasion was Patrick AFB, the Air Force's Guided Missile Long-Range Proving Ground on the east coast of Florida

On the night of July 18, at ten forty-five, two officers were standing in front of base operations at Patrick when they noticed a light at about a 45-degree angle from the horizon and off to the west It was an ahter than a star”

Both officers had heard flying saucer stories, and both thought the light was a balloon But, to be comedians, they called to several more officers and airmen inside the operations office and told the saucer” The people came out and looked A feere surprised and took the ht seriously, at the expense of considerable laughter froht grew livelier and bets that it was a balloon were placed In the ht had drifted over the base, had stopped for about anorth To settle the bet, one of the officers stepped into the base weather office to find out about the balloon Yes, one was in the air and being tracked by radar, he was told The weather officer said that he would call to find out exactly where it was He called and found out that the weather balloon was being tracked due west of the base and that the light had gone out about ten minutes before The officer went back outside to find that as first thought to be a balloon was now straight north of the field and still lighted To add to the confusion, a second arees lower than where the first one was initially seen, and it was also heading north but at a ht stopped and started roup of officers and airhts, the people from the weather office came out to tell the UFO observers that the balloon was still traveling straight west They were just in ti across the sky, directly overhead, from west to east A weatherain--their balloon was still far to the west of the base

Inside of fifteen hts caree turn over the ocean, and came back over the observers

In the midst of the melee a radar set had been turned on but it couldn't pick up any targets This did, however, eli aircraft They weren't stray balloons either, because the winds at all altitudes were blowing in a westerly direction They obviously weren't hts on a haze layer because there was no weather conducive to forhts They could have been soative approach Or, if you take the positive approach, they could have been spaceshi+ps

The next night radar at Washi+ngton National Airport picked up UFO's and one of the s of UFO history was in theFlap

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Washi+ngton Merry-Go-Round

No flying saucer report in the history of the UFO ever won s

When radars at the Washi+ngton National Airport and at Andrews AFB, both close to the nation's capital, picked up UFO's, the sightings beat the Democratic National Convention out of headline space They created such a furor that I had inquiries from the office of the President of the United States and from the press in London, Ottawa, and Mexico City A junior-sized riot was only narrowly averted in the lobby of the Roger Ston when I refused to tell US newspaper reporters what I knew about the sightings

Besides being the s in the Air Force annals, they were also the most monuh the Air Force said that the incident had been fully investigated, the Civil Aeronautics Authority wrote a forazine writers studied them, the complete story has never fully been told The pros have been left out of the con accounts, and the cons were neatly overlooked by the pro writers

For a year after the twin sightings ere still putting little pieces in the puzzle

In sos could be classed as a surprise--we used this as an excuse when things got fouled up-- but in other ways they weren't A few days prior to the incident a scientist, fro about the build-up of reports along the east coast of the United States We talked for about two hours, and I was ready to leave when he said that he had one last comment to make--a prediction Fro from Air Force Headquarters, and froht that ere sitting right on top of a big keg full of loaded flying saucers

”Within the next few days,” he told me, and I remember that he punctuated his slow, deliberate re to blow up and you're going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings The sighting will occur in Washi+ngton or New York,” he predicted, ”probably Washi+ngton”

The trend in the UFO reports that this scientist based his prediction on hadn't gone unnoticed We on Project Blue Book had seen it, and so had the people in the Pentagon; we all had talked about it