ar operating, he had to worry about the
Japs' shooting holes in his antennae.

Captain James decided that this Alaskan sighting I'd just shown him
was caused by some kind of freak weather. He based his analysis on
the fact that the unknown target had disappeared each time the ground
radar had been switched to short range. This, he pointed out, is an
indication that the radar was picking up some kind of a target that
was caused by weather. The same weather that caused the ground radar
to act up must have caused false targets on the F-94's radar too, he
continued. After all, they had closed to within 200 yards of what
they were supposedly picking up; it was a clear moonlight night, yet
the crews of the F-94's hadn't seen a thing.

Taking a clue from the law profession, he quoted a precedent. About
a year before over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, an F-82 interceptor had
nearly flown into the ground three times as the pilot attempted to
follow a target that his radar operator was picking up. There was a
strong inversion that night, and although the target appeared as if
it were flying in the air, it was actually a ground target.

Since Captain James was the chief of the radar section and he had
said "Weather," weather was the official conclusion on the report.
But reports of UFO's' being picked up on radar are controversial, and
some of the people didn't agree with James's conclusion.

A month or two after we'd received the report, I was out in Colorado
Springs at Air Defense Command Headquarters. I was eating lunch in
the officers' club when I saw an officer from the radar operations
section at ADC. He asked me to stop by his office when I had a spare
minute, and I said that I would. He said that it was important.

It was the middle of the afternoon before I saw him and found out
what he wanted. He had been in Alaska on TDY when the UFO had been
picked up at the outpost radar site. In fact, he had made a trip to
both the radar site and the interceptor base just two days after the
sighting, and he had talked about the sighting with the people who
had seen the UFO on the radar. He wanted to know what we thought
about it.

When I told him that the sighting had been written off as weather, I
remember that he got a funny look on his face and said, "Weather!
What are you guys trying to pull, anyway?"

It was obvious that he didn't agree with our conclusion. I was
interested in learning what this man thought because I knew that h