night of July 12 it was hot
in Chicago. At nine forty-two there were at least 400 people at
Montrose Beach trying to beat the heat. Many of them were lying down
looking at the stars, so that they saw the UFO as it came in from the
west northwest, made a 180-degree turn directly over their heads, and
disappeared over the horizon. It was a "large red light with small
white lights on the side," most of the people reported. Some of them
said that it changed to a single yellow light as it made its turn. It
was in sight about five minutes, and during this time no one reported
hearing any sound.

One of the people at the beach was the weather officer from O'Hare
International Airport, an Air Force captain. He immediately called
O'Hare. They checked on balloon flights and with radar, but both were
negative; radar said that there had been no aircraft in the area of
Montrose Beach for several hours.

I sent an investigator to Chicago, and although he came back with a
lot of data on the sighting, it didn't add up to be anything known.

The next day Dayton had its first UFO sighting in a long time when a
Mr. Roy T. Ellis, president of the Rubber Seal Products Company, and
many other people, reported a teardrop-shaped object that hovered
over Dayton for several minutes about midnight. This sighting had an
interesting twist because two years later I was in Dayton and stopped
in at ATIC to see a friend who is one of the technical advisers at
the center.

Naturally the conversation got around to the subject of UFO's, and
he asked me if I remembered this specific sighting. I did, so he went
on to say that he and his wife had seen this UFO that night but they
had never told anybody. He was very serious when he admitted that he
had no idea what it could have been. Now I'd heard this statement a
thousand times before from other people, but coming from this person,
it was really something because he was as anti-saucer as anyone I
knew. Then he added, "From that time on I didn't think your saucer
reporters were as crazy as I used to think they were."

The Dayton sighting also created quite a stir in the press. In
conjunction with the sighting, the Dayton Daily _Journal_ had
interviewed Colonel Richard H. Magee, the Dayton-Oakwood civil
defense director; they wanted to know what he thought about the
UFO's. The colonel's answer made news: "There's something flying
around in our skies and we wish we knew what it was."

When the story br