st
of the field when he first noticed an object below him and "about
three runway lengths off the end of Runway 30." The object looked
like the top of a parachute canopy, he told me; it was white and he
thought he could see the wedges or panels. He said that he thought
that it was moving across the ground a little bit too fast to be
drifting with wind, but he was sure that somebody had bailed out and
that he was looking at the top of his parachute. He was just ready to
call the tower when he suddenly realized that this "parachute" was
drifting across the wind. He had just taken off from Runway 30 and
knew which direction the wind was blowing.

As he watched, the object, whatever it was (by now he no longer
thought that it was a parachute), began to gradually climb, so he
started to climb, he said, staying above and off to the right of the
object. When the UFO started to make a left turn, he followed and
tried to cut inside, but he overshot and passed over it. It continued
to turn and gain speed, so he dropped the nose of the TBM, put on
more power, and pulled in behind the object, which was now level with
him. In a matter of seconds the UFO made a 180-degree turn and
started to make a big swing around the northern edge of Mitchel AFB.
The pilot tried to follow, but the UFO had begun to accelerate
rapidly, and since a TBM leaves much to be desired on the speed end,
he was getting farther and farther behind. But he did try to follow
it as long as he could. As he made a wide turn around the northern
edge of the airfield he saw that the UFO was now turning south. He
racked the TBM up into a tight left turn to follow, but in a few
seconds the UFO had disappeared. When he last saw it, it had crossed
the Long Island coast line near Freeport and it was heading out to sea.

When he finished his account of the chase, I asked the commander
some specific questions about the UFO. He said that just after he'd
decided that the UFO was not a parachute it appeared to be at an
altitude of about 200 to 300 feet over a residential section. From
the time it took it to cover a city block, he'd estimated that it was
traveling about 300 miles an hour. Even when he pulled in behind the
object and got a good look, it still looked like a parachute canopy--
dome-shaped--white--and it had a dark undersurface. It had been in
sight two and a half minutes.

He had called the control tower at Mitchel during the chase, he told
me, but only to ask if