le their speed.
They watched the target as it made a turn and started to climb over
Los Angeles. They plotted one, two, three, and then four points
during the target's climb; then one of the crew grabbed a slide rule.
Whatever it was, it was climbing 35,000 feet per minute and traveling
about 550 miles an hour in the process. Then as they watched the
scope, the target leveled out for a few seconds, went into a high-
speed dive, and again leveled out at 55,000 feet. When they lost the
target, it was heading southeast somewhere near Riverside, California.

During the sighting my caller told me that when the UFO was only
about ten miles from the radar site two of the crew had gone outside
but they couldn't see anything. But, he explained, even the high-
flying jets that they had been tracking hadn't been leaving vapor
trails.

The first thing I asked when the Hughes test engineer finished his
story was if the radar set had been working properly. He said that as
soon as the UFO had left the scope they had run every possible check
on the radar and it was O.K.

I was just about to ask my caller if the target might not have been
some experimental airplane from Edwards AFB when he second-guessed
me. He said that after sitting around looking at each other for about
a minute, someone suggested that they call Edwards. They did, and
Edwards' flight operations told them that they had nothing in the area.

I asked him about the weather. The target didn't look like a weather
target was the answer, but just to be sure, the test crew had
checked. One of his men was an electronics-weather specialist whom he
had hired because of his knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of radar
under certain weather conditions. This man had looked into the
weather angle. He had gotten the latest weather data and checked it,
but there wasn't the slightest indication of an inversion or any
other weather that would cause a false target.

Just before I hung up I asked the man what he thought he and his
crew had picked up, and once again I got the same old answer:
"Yesterday at this time any of us would have argued for hours that
flying saucers were a bunch of nonsense but now, regardless of what
you'll say about what we saw, it was something damned real."

I thanked the man for calling and hung up. We couldn't make any more
of an analysis of this report than had already been made, it was
another unknown.

I went over to the MO file and pulled out the stac