ain area, and I
knew that the UFO had to be higher than 35,000 feet because the T-33
jet had been this high and the UFO was still above it. The only thing
to do was to check with all of the weather stations in the area. I
called Richmond, Roanoke, several places in the vicinity of
Washington, D.C., and four or five other weather stations, but all of
their balloons were accounted for and none had been anywhere close to
the central part of Virginia.

A balloon can travel only so far, so there was no sense in checking
stations too far away from where the people had seen the UFO, but I
took a chance and called Norfolk; Charleston, West Virginia; Altoona,
Pennsylvania; and other stations within a 150-mile radius of
Gordonsville and Blackstone. Nothing.

I still thought it might be a balloon, so I started to call more
stations. At Pittsburgh I hit a lead. Their radiosonde balloon had
gone up to about 60,000 feet and evidently had sprung a slow leak
because it had leveled off at that altitude. Normally balloons go up
till they burst at 80,000 or 90,000 feet. The weather forecaster at
Pittsburgh said that their records showed they had lost contact with
the balloon when it was about 60 miles southeast of their station. He
said that the winds at 60,000 feet were constant, so it shouldn't be
too difficult to figure out where the balloon went after they had
lost it. Things must be dull in Pittsburgh at 2:00 a.m. on Monday
mornings, because he offered to plot the course that the balloon
probably took and call me back.

In about twenty minutes I got my call. It probably was their
balloon, the forecaster said. Above 50,000 feet there was a strong
flow of air southeast from Pittsburgh, and this fed into a stronger
southerly flow that was paralleling the Atlantic coast just east of
the Appalachian Mountains. The balloon would have floated along in
this flow of air like a log floating down a river. As close as he
could estimate, he said, the balloon would arrive in the Gordonsville-
Blackstone area in the late afternoon or early evening. This was just
about the time the UFO had arrived.

"Probably a balloon" was a good enough answer for me.

The next morning at 8:00A.M., Al Chop called from the Pentagon to
tell me that people were crawling all over his desk wanting to know
about a sighting in Virginia.

The reports continued to come in. At Walnut Lake, Michigan, a group
of people with binoculars watched a "soft white light" go ba