The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects | Page 8

at
least three times that of an F-86. They got a good look at the three
deltas as the unusual craft passed within 400 to 800 yards of the B-25.
When they landed at Colorado Springs, the two colonels called the
intelligence people at Air Defense Command Headquarters to make a
UFO report. The suggestion was offered that they might have seen
three F- 86's. The colonels promptly replied that if the objects had been
F- 86's they would have easily been recognized as such. The colonels
knew what F-86's looked like.
Air Defense Command relayed the report to Project Blue Book. An
investigation was started at once.
Flight Service, which clears all military aircraft flights, was contacted
and asked about the location of aircraft near the Carson Sink area at
3:40P.M. They had no record of the presence of aircraft in that area.
Since the colonels had mentioned delta wing aircraft, and both the Air

Force and the Navy had a few of this type, we double-checked. The
Navy's deltas were all on the east coast, at least all of the silver ones
were. A few deltas painted the traditional navy blue were on the west
coast, but not near Carson Sink. The Air Force's one delta was
temporarily grounded.
Since balloons once in a while can appear to have an odd shape, all
balloon flights were checked for both standard weather balloons and
the big 100-foot-diameter research balloons. Nothing was found.
A quick check on the two colonels revealed that both of them were
command pilots and that each had several thousand hours of flying
time. They were stationed at the Pentagon. Their highly classified
assignments were such that they would be in a position to recognize
anything that the United States knows to be flying anywhere in the
world.
Both men had friends who had "seen flying saucers" at some time, but
both had openly voiced their skepticism. Now, from what the colonels
said when they were interviewed after landing at Colorado Springs,
they had changed their opinions.
Nobody knows what the two colonels saw over Carson Sink. However,
it is always possible to speculate. Maybe they just thought they were
close enough to the three objects to see them plainly. The objects might
have been three F-86's: maybe Flight Service lost the records. It could
be that the three F-86's had taken off to fly in the local area of their
base but had decided to do some illegal sight-seeing. Flight Service
would have no record of a flight like this. Maybe both of the colonels
had hallucinations.
There is a certain mathematical probability that any one of the above
speculative answers is correct--correct for this one case. If you try this
type of speculation on hundreds of sightings with "unknown" answers,
the probability that the speculative answers are correct rapidly
approaches zero.
Maybe the colonels actually did see what they thought they did, a type

of craft completely foreign to them.
Another good UFO report provides an incident in which there is hardly
room for any speculation of this type. The conclusion is more simply,
"Unknown," period.
On January 20, 1952, at seven-twenty in the evening, two master
sergeants, both intelligence specialists, were walking down a street on
the Fairchild Air Force Base, close to Spokane, Washington.
Suddenly both men noticed a large, bluish-white, spherical-shaped
object approaching from the east. They stopped and watched the object
carefully, because several of these UFO's had been reported by pilots
from the air base over the past few months. The sergeants had written
up the reports on these earlier sightings.
The object was traveling at a moderately fast speed on a horizontal path.
As it passed to the north of their position and disappeared in the west,
the sergeants noted that it had a long blue tail. At no time did they hear
any sound. They noted certain landmarks that the object had crossed
and estimated the time taken in passing these landmarks. The next day
they went out and measured the angles between these landmarks in
order to include them in their report.
When we got the report at ATIC, our first reaction was that the master
sergeants had seen a large meteor. From the evidence I had written off,
as meteors, all previous similar UFO reports from this air base.
The sergeants' report, however, contained one bit of information that
completely changed the previous picture. At the time of the sighting
there had been a solid 6,000-foot-thick overcast at 4,700 feet. And
meteors don't go that low.
A few quick calculations gave a rather fantastic answer. If the object
was just at the base of the clouds it would have been 10,000 feet from
the two observers and traveling 1,400 miles per hour.
But regardless of the speed,