lts of the analysis of the
sighting, they must have gotten the B-36 treatment because the case
was closed.

I'd only been at ATIC two days and I certainly didn't class myself
as an intelligence expert, but it didn't take an expert to see that a
B-36, even one piloted by an experienced idiot, could not do what the
UFO had done--buzz a DC-3 that was in an airport traffic pattern.

I didn't know it at the time but a similar event had occurred the
year before. On the night of May 29, 1950, the crew of an American
Airlines DC-6 had just taken off from Washington National Airport,
and they were about seven miles west of Mount Vernon when the copilot
suddenly looked out and yelled, "Watch it--watch it." The pilot and
the engineer looked out to see a bluish-white light closing in on
them from dead ahead. The pilot racked the DC-6 up in a tight right
turn while the UFO passed by on the left "from eleven to seven
o'clock" and a little higher than the airliner. During this time the
UFO passed between the full moon and DC-6 and the crew could see the
dark silhouette of a "wingless B-29." Its length was about half the
diameter of the full moon, and it had a blue flame shooting out the
tail end.

Seconds after the UFO had passed by the DC-6, the copilot looked out
and there it was again, apparently flying formation off their right
wing. Then in a flash of blue flame it was gone--streaking out ahead
of the airliner and making a left turn toward the coast.

The pilot of the DC-6, who made the report, had better than 15,000
hours' flying time.

I didn't hear anything about UFO's, or flying saucers, as they were
then known, for several weeks but I kept them in mind and one day I
asked one of the old hands at ATIC about them--specifically I wanted
to know about the Sioux City Incident. Why had it been sloughed off
so lightly? His answer was typical of the official policy at that
time. "One of these days all of these crazy pilots will kill
themselves, the crazy people on the ground will be locked up, and
there won't be any more flying saucer reports."

But after I knew the people at ATIC a little better, I found that
being anti-saucer wasn't a unanimous feeling. Some of the
intelligence officers took the UFO reports seriously. One man, who
had been on Project Sign since it was organized back in 1947, was
convinced that the UFO's were interplanetary spaceships. He had
questioned the people in the control tower at Godman AFB when Cap