es the
size of a landing light of an airplane." It continued to close in and
with a flash it streaked by the DC-4's left wing. Before the crew
could react and say anything, two more smaller balls of fire flashed
by. Both pilots later said that they sat in their seats for several
seconds with sweat trickling down their backs.

It was one of these two pilots who later said, "Were you ever
traveling along the highway about 70 miles an hour at night, have the
car that you were meeting suddenly swerve over into your lane and
then cut back so that you just miss it by inches? You know the sort
of sick, empty feeling you get when it's all over? That's just the
way we felt."

As soon as the crew recovered from the shock, the pilot picked up
his mike, called Jacksonville Radio, and told them about the
incident. Minutes later we had the report. The next afternoon
Lieutenant Kerry Rothstien, who had replaced Lieutenant Metscher on
the project, was on his way to New York to meet the pilots when they
returned from Puerto Rico.

When Kerry talked to the two pilots, they couldn't add a great deal
to their original story. Their final comment was the one we all had
heard so many times, "I always thought these people who reported
flying saucers were crazy, but now I don't know."

When Lieutenant Rothstien returned to Dayton he triple-checked with
the CAA for aircraft in the area--but there were none. Could there
have been airplanes in the area that CAA didn't know about? The
answer was almost a flat "No." No one would fly 600 miles off the
coast without filing a flight plan; if he got into trouble or went
down, the Coast Guard or Air Rescue Service would have no idea where
to look.

Kerry was given the same negative answer when he checked on surface
shipping.

The last possibility was that the UFO's were meteors, but several
points in the pilots' story ruled these out. First, there was a solid
overcast at about 18,000 feet. No meteor cruises along straight and
level below 18,000 feet. Second, on only rare occasions have meteors
been seen traveling three in trail. The chances of seeing such a
phenomenon are well over one in a billion.

Some people have guessed that some kind of an atmospheric phenomenon
can form a "wall of air" ahead of an airplane that will act as a
mirror and that lights seen at night by pilots are nothing more than
the reflection of the airplane's own lights. This could be true in
some cases, but to have a re