orm of a hot
report.

At 3:40P.M. a woman at Unionville, Virginia, had reported a "very
shiny object" at high altitude.

At 4:20P.M. the operators of the CAA radio facility at Gordonsville,
Virginia, had reported that they saw a "round, shiny object." It was
southeast of their station, or directly south of Unionville.

At 4:25P.M. the crew of an airliner northwest of Richmond, Virginia,
reported a "silver sphere at eleven o'clock high."

At 4:43P.M. a Marine pilot in a jet tried to intercept a "round
shiny sphere" south of Gordonsville.

At 5:43P.M. an Air Force T-33 jet tried to intercept a "shiny
sphere" south of Gordonsville. He got above 35,000 feet and the UFO
was still far above him.

At 7:35P.M. many people in Blackstone, Virginia, about 80 miles
south of Gordonsville, reported it. It was a "round, shiny object
with a golden glow" moving from north to south. By this time radio
commentators in central Virginia were giving a running account of the
UFO's progress.

At 7:59P.M. the people in the CAA radio facility at Blackstone saw it.

At 8:00P.M. jets arrived from Langley AFB to attempt to intercept
it, but at 8:05P.M. it disappeared.

This was a good report because it was the first time we ever
received a series of reports on the same object, and there was no
doubt that all these people had reported the same object. Whatever it
was, it wasn't moving too fast, because it had traveled only about 90
miles in four hours and twenty-five minutes. I was about ready to
give up until morning and go home when my wife called. The local
Associated Press man had called our home and she assumed that it was
about this sighting. She had just said that I was out so he might not
call the base. I decided that I'd better keep working so I'd have the
answer in time to keep the story out of the papers. A report like
this could cause some excitement.

The UFO obviously wasn't a planet because it was moving from north
to south, and it was too slow to be an airplane. I called the balloon-
plotting center at Lowry AFB, where the tracks of the big skyhook
balloons are plotted, but the only big balloons in the air were in
the western United States, and they were all accounted for.

It might have been a weather balloon. The wind charts showed that
the high-altitude winds were blowing in different directions at
different altitudes above 35,000 feet, so there was no one flow of
air that could have brought a balloon in from a cert