in that his home is on a hilltop in the country,
and when looking south, he had a view of the entire countryside.
While he was talking to the two other people he noticed a light
approaching from the west. He had assumed it was an airplane and had
casually watched it, but when the light got fairly close, the CIA man
said that he suddenly realized there wasn't any sound associated with
it. If it were an airplane it would have been close enough for him to
hear even above the hum of the guests' conversations. He had actually
quit talking and was looking at the light when it stopped for an
instant and began to climb almost vertically. He said something to
the other guests, and they looked up just in time to see the light
finish its climb, stop, and level out. They all watched it travel
level for a few seconds, then go into a nearly vertical dive, level
out, and streak off to the east.

Most everyone at the party had seen the light before it disappeared,
and within minutes several friendly arguments as to what it was had
developed, I was told. One person thought it was a lighted balloon,
and a retired general thought it was an airplane. To settle the
arguments, they had made a few telephone calls. I might add that
these people were such that the mention of their names on a telephone
got quick results. Radar in the Washington area said that there had
been no airplanes flying west to east south of Alexandria in the past
hour. The weather station at Bolling AFB said that there were no
balloons in the area, but as a double check the weather people looked
at their records of high-altitude winds. It couldn't have been a
balloon because none of the winds up to 65,000 feet were blowing from
west to east--and to be able to see a light on a balloon, it has to
be well below 65,000 feet; the man from CIA told me that they had
even considered the possibility that the UFO was a meteor and that
the "jump" had been due to some kind of an atmospheric distortion.
But the light had been in sight too long to be a meteor. He added
that an army chaplain and two teetotaler guests had also seen the
light jump.

There wasn't much left for me to do when I finished talking to the
man. He and his guests had already made all of the checks that I'd
have made. All I could do was go back to Dayton, write up his report,
and stamp it "Unknown."

Back in March, when it had become apparent that the press was
reviving its interest in UFO's, I had suggested t