atching the balloon through a theodolite, an
instrument similar to a surveyor's transit built around a 25-power
telescope, one man was holding a stop watch, and a third had a
clipboard to record the measured data. The crew had tracked the
balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly shouted and
pointed off to the left. The whole crew looked at the part of the sky
where the man was excitedly pointing, and there was a UFO. "It didn't
appear to be large," one of the scientists later said, "but it was
plainly visible. It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape
and had a 'whitish-silver color.'" After taking a split second to
realize what they were looking at, one of the men swung the
theodolite around to pick up the object, and the timer reset his stop
watch. For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it moved toward the
east. In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped from an angle of
elevation of 45 degrees to 25 degrees, then it zoomed upward and in a
few seconds it was out of sight. The crew heard no sound and the New
Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard "a
whisper a mile away."

When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew
found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second. At
one time during the observed portion of its flight, the UFO had
passed in front of a range of mountains that were visible to the
observers. Using this as a check point, they estimated the size of
the UFO to be 40 feet wide and 100 feet long, and they computed that
the UFO had been at an altitude of 296,000 feet, or _56_ miles, when
they had first seen it, and that it was traveling 7 miles per second.

This wasn't the only UFO sighting made by White Sands scientists. On
April 5, 1948, another team watched a UFO for several minutes as it
streaked across the afternoon sky in a series of violent maneuvers.
The disk-shaped object was about a fifth the size of a full moon.

On another occasion the crew of a C-47 that was tracking a skyhook
balloon saw two similar UFO's come loping in from just above the
horizon, circle the balloon, which was flying at just under 90,000
feet, and rapidly leave. When the balloon was recovered it was ripped.

I knew the two pilots of the C-47; both of them now believe in
flying saucers. And they aren't alone; so do the people of the
Aeronautical Division of General Mills who launch and track the big
skyhook balloons. These scientists and engin