Part 38 (1/2)

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

At 5:16 it was back and the lassitude was instantly gone Now the target was 22 miles _south_ of the shi+p No one in the CIC had to draw a picture So, in two minutes, had disappeared off the scope to the north, e, 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 shi+p, was held for two full et moved out froet was back but noas _north_ of the shi+p 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 coht, like a planet” was streaking across the northwest sky about 30 degrees above the horizon Unfortunately the radar had lost contact for a et disappeared froo_ Case was ended but the UFO's continued to fly

Reports continued to coators lost a lot of sleep

The next day at 3:50PM the CO of an Air Force weather detach Beach, California, and twelve air _under_ the bases of a 7000 foot high cloud deck

On the sa Beach, officers and men at the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station saw UFO's almost continuously between the hours of 6:05 and 7:25PM

Long Beach police reported ”well over a hundred calls” during this sa November and December of 1957 it was a situation of you na to sift the out a plateful of spaghetti And if you succeeded you would have a document the size of the New York City telephone directory

Most of the reports were explained

The Levelland, Texas, sightings ritten off as ”St El Ground saw the h broken clouds and the crew of the Coast Guard shi+p _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 tea 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 Coht of so htened theiaover Chicago at dusk, cost the taxpayers another several thousand dollars but the pilots , renowned Swiss psychologist, idely publicized in July 1958 Dr Jung was quoted as saying, in a letter to a US saucer club, ”UFO's are real” When Dr Jung read what he was supposed to have written the Alps rang with screaot excited until the earlyof Septe an to pour into the Air Force Soht 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 froton, ”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,” cah, Soerstown and Frederick in Maryland To add to the confusion, people in Pennsylvania reported seeing three objects ”flying in forators took the first step in the solution of any UFO report They plotted the sightings on a ht, descriptions and times of observation It was obvious that the object had h It was traveling about 7000 miles an hour and everyone had obviously seen the same object By the time it had passed into Pennsylvania it had split into three objects

But the hooker was the reported landings northeast of Washi+ngton

Too round 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