Part 25 (2/2)

Later searches for this ht were equally fruitless

They rass was located and left

The constable took the boy scouts home and the scoutmaster followed the deputy to the sheriff's office On the way to town the scoutmaster said he first noticed that his arms and face burned When he arrived at the sheriff's office, he found that his arms, face, and cap _were_ burned The deputy called the Air Force

There were six people listening to his story Bob Olsson, the two pilots, the intelligence officer, his sergeant, and I We each had previously agreed to pick one insignificant detail from the story and then re-question the scoutmaster when he had finished Our theory was that if he had made up the story he would either repeat the details perfectly or not remember what he'd said I'd used this ood indicator of a lie He passed the test with flying colors His story sounded good to all of us

We talked for about another hour, discussing the event and his background He kept asking, ”What did I see?”--evidently thinking that I knew He said that the newspapers were after him, since the sheriff's office had inadvertently leaked the story, but that he had been stalling the our arrival I told hi they wanted to about a UFO sighting We had never muzzled anyone; it was his choice With that, we thanked hied to pick up the cap and machete to take back to Dayton, and sent hi late, but I wanted to talk to the flight surgeon who had exaence officer found hiht over

His report was very thorough The only thing he could find out of the ordinary were minor burns on his arms and the back of his hands

There were also indications that the inside of his nostrils ht sunburn The hair had also been singed, indicating a flash heat

The flight surgeon had no idea how this specifically could have happened It could have even been done with a cigarette lighter, and he took his lighter and singed a small area of his arm to demonstrate He had been asked only to make a physical check, so that is what he'd done, but he did offer a suggestion Check his Marine records; soree; the story sounded good toence office, and the t officers went out to where the incident had taken place We found the spot where so and the scouth the thicket

We checked the area with a Geiger counter, as a precautionary ; we didn't We went over the area inch by inch, hoping to find a burned hted, drippings fro that shouldn't have been in a deserted area of woods We looked at the trees; they hadn't been hit by lightning The blades of grass under which the UFO supposedly hovered were not burned We found nothing to contradict the story We took a few photos of the area and went back to town On the way back we talked to the constable and the deputy All they could do was to confirm e'd heard

We talked to the farmer and his wife, but they couldn't help The few facts that the boy scouts had given them before they had a chance to talk to their scoutmaster correlated with his story We talked to the scoutmaster's employer and some of his friends; he was a fine person We questioned people who ; they saw nothing The local citizens had a dozen theories, and we thoroughly checked each one

He hadn't been struck by lightning He hadn't run across a still

There was no indication that he'd surprised a gang of illegal turtle butcherers, sas or swahts in the area turned out to be a far saucers were the landing lights of airplanes landing at a nearby airport

To be very honest, ere trying to prove that this was a hoax, but were having absolutely no success Every new lead we dug up pointed to the sa, a true story

We finished our work on a Friday night and planned to leave early SaturdayBob Olsson and I planned to fly back on a corounded for ot a call from the sheriff's office It was from a deputy I had talked to, not the one whoout of the woods, but another one, who had been very interested in the incident He had been doing a little independent checking and found that our singed UFO observer's background was not as clean as he led one to believe He had been booted out of the Marines after a fewan automobile, and had spent some time in a federal reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio The deputy pointed out that this fact alone ht be interested in it I agreed

The next , early, I akened by a phone call fro paper carried the UFO story on the front page It quoted the scoutton had questioned hih brass,” just four captains, a second lieutenant, and a sergeant He kneere from Dayton because we had discussed ere and where ere stationed The newspaper story went on to say that ”he, the scoutmaster, and the Air Force knehat he'd seen but he couldn't tell--it would create a national panic” He'd also hired a press agent I could understand the ”high brass froon”

as literary license by the press, but this ”national panic” pitch was too ive up on this incident and write it off as ”Unknown” until this happened Fro tofor Dayton, I called Major Dewey Fournet in the Pentagon and asked hi the ht- Patterson The question we asked was, ”Is there anything unusual about this netized? Is it radioactive? Has it been heated?” No knife was ever tested so thoroughly for so er counter to check the area over which the UFO had hovered in the Florida woods, our idea was to investigate every possible aspect of the sighting They found nothing, just a plain, unnetized, unradioactive, unheated, common, everyday knife

The cap was sent to a laboratory in Washi+ngton, DC, along with the scoutmaster's story Our question here was, ”Does the cap in any way (burns, cheht that we'd collected all the iteht of one I'd rass samples from under the spot where the UFO had hovered We'd had saet back to Dayton they had been left in Florida I called Florida and they were shi+pped to Dayton and turned over to an agronomy lab for analysis

By the end of the week I received a report on our ex-Marine's military and reformatory records They confirmed a few suspicions and added new facts They were not complimentary The discrepancy bete'd heard about the scoutmaster while ere in Florida and the records was considered a o back to Florida and try to resolve this discrepancy

Since it was hurricane season, we had to wait a few days, then sneak back between two hurricanes We contacted a dozen people in the city where the scoutmaster lived All of them had known him for some time

We traced hi To be sure that the people we talked to were reliable, we checked on thes we found out cannot be told since they were given to us in confidence, but ere convinced that the whole incident was a hoax

We didn't talk to the scoutht at their scout , and they retold how they had seen their scoutht before, we had gone out to the area of the sighting and, under approxiht of the sighting, had re-enacted the scene--especially the part where the boy scouts saw their scoutmaster fall, covered with red fire We found that not even by standing _on_ _top_ _of_ _the_ _car_ could you see a person silhouetted in the clearing where the scoutmaster supposedly fell The rest of their stories fell apart to some extent too They were not as positive of details as they had been previously

When we returned to Dayton, the report on the cap had come back The pattern of the scorch showed that the hat was flat when it was scorched, but the burned holes--the lab found some minute holes we had missed--had very probably been made by an electrical spark This was all the lab could find