sound and they were away from all city noises, aircraft
don't carry just one or two amber lights, and the distance between
the two lights was such that had they been on an airplane the
airplane would have been huge or very close to the observers. And
last, but not least, the man from the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics was a very famous aerodynamicist and of such professional
stature that if he said the lights weren't airplanes they weren't.

This then was the big build-up to the first Washington national
sighting and the reason why my friend predicted that the Air Force
was sitting on a big powder keg of loaded flying saucers.

When the keg blew the best laid schemes of the mice and men at ATIC,
they went the way best laid schemes are supposed to. The first one of
the highly publicized Washington national sightings started,
according to the CAA's logbook at the airport, at 11:40P.M. on the
night of July 19 when two radars at National Airport picked up eight
unidentified targets east and south of Andrews AFB. The targets
weren't airplanes because they would loaf along at 100 to 130 miles
an hour then suddenly accelerate to "fantastically high speeds" and
leave the area. During the night the crews of several airliners saw
mysterious lights in the same locations that the radars showed the
targets; tower operators also saw lights, and jet fighters were
brought in.

But nobody bothered to tell Air Force Intelligence about the
sighting. When reporters began to call intelligence and ask about the
big sighting behind the headlines, INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS
OVER WASHINGTON, D.C., they were told that no one had ever heard of
such a sighting. In the next edition the headlines were supplemented
by, AIR FORCE WONT TALK.

Thus intelligence was notified about the first Washington national
sighting.

I heard about the sighting about ten o'clock Monday morning when
Colonel Donald Bower and I got off an airliner from Dayton and I
bought a newspaper in the lobby of the Washington National Airport
Terminal Building. I called the Pentagon from the airport and talked
to Major Dewey Fournet, but all he knew was what he'd read in the
papers. He told me that he had called the intelligence officer at
Bolling AFB and that he was making an investigation. We would get a
preliminary official report by noon.

It was about 1:00P.M. when Major Fournet called me and said that the
intelligence officer from Bolling was in hi