local
area of their base but had decided to do some illegal sight-seeing.
Flight Service would have no record of a flight like this. Maybe both
of the colonels had hallucinations.

There is a certain mathematical probability that any one of the
above speculative answers is correct--correct for this one case. If
you try this type of speculation on hundreds of sightings with
"unknown" answers, the probability that the speculative answers are
correct rapidly approaches zero.

Maybe the colonels actually did see what they thought they did, a
type of craft completely foreign to them.

Another good UFO report provides an incident in which there is
hardly room for any speculation of this type. The conclusion is more
simply, "Unknown," period.

On January 20, 1952, at seven-twenty in the evening, two master
sergeants, both intelligence specialists, were walking down a street
on the Fairchild Air Force Base, close to Spokane, Washington.

Suddenly both men noticed a large, bluish-white, spherical-shaped
object approaching from the east. They stopped and watched the object
carefully, because several of these UFO's had been reported by pilots
from the air base over the past few months. The sergeants had written
up the reports on these earlier sightings.

The object was traveling at a moderately fast speed on a horizontal
path. As it passed to the north of their position and disappeared in
the west, the sergeants noted that it had a long blue tail. At no
time did they hear any sound. They noted certain landmarks that the
object had crossed and estimated the time taken in passing these
landmarks. The next day they went out and measured the angles between
these landmarks in order to include them in their report.

When we got the report at ATIC, our first reaction was that the
master sergeants had seen a large meteor. From the evidence I had
written off, as meteors, all previous similar UFO reports from this
air base.

The sergeants' report, however, contained one bit of information
that completely changed the previous picture. At the time of the
sighting there had been a solid 6,000-foot-thick overcast at 4,700
feet. And meteors don't go that low.

A few quick calculations gave a rather fantastic answer. If the
object was just at the base of the clouds it would have been 10,000
feet from the two observers and traveling 1,400 miles per hour.

But regardless of the speed, the story was still fantastic. The
object was no