ave been amazed to hear a group of reputable scientists
make such a startling statement. Now, however, I took it as a matter
of course. I'd heard the same type of statement many times before
from equally qualified groups.

Turn the tables, they said, suppose that we are going to try to go
to a far planet. There would be three phases to the trip: out through
the earth's atmosphere, through space, and the re-entry into the
atmosphere of the planet we're planning to land on. The first two
phases would admittedly present formidable problems, but the last
phase, the re-entry phase, would be the most critical. Coming in from
outer space, the craft would, for all practical purposes, be similar
to a meteorite except that it would be powered and not free-falling.
You would have myriad problems associated with aerodynamic heating,
high aerodynamic loadings, and very probably a host of other problems
that no one can now conceive of. Certain of these problems could be
partially solved by laboratory experimentation, but nothing can
replace flight testing, and the results obtained by flight tests in
our atmosphere would not be valid in another type of atmosphere. The
most logical way to overcome this difficulty would be to build our
interplanetary vehicle, go to the planet that we were interested in
landing on, and hover several hundred miles up. From this altitude we
could send instrumented test vehicles down to the planet. If we
didn't want the inhabitants of the planet, if it were inhabited, to
know what we were doing we could put destruction devices in the test
vehicle, or arrange the test so that the test vehicles would just
plain burn up at a certain point due to aerodynamic heating.

They continued, each man injecting his ideas.

Maybe the green fireballs are test vehicles--somebody else's. The
regular UFO reports might be explained by the fact that the manned
vehicles were venturing down to within 100,000 or 200,000 feet of the
earth, or to the altitude at which atmosphere re-entry begins to get
critical.

I had to go down to the airstrip to get a CARCO Airlines plane back
to Albuquerque so I didn't have time to ask a lot of questions that
came into my mind. I did get to make one comment. From the
conversations, I assumed that these people didn't think the green
fireballs were any kind of a natural phenomenon. Not exactly, they
said, but so far the evidence that said they were a natural
phenomenon was vastly outweighed b