uled the nose of his F-86
up in a stall and exposed several feet of gun camera film. Just as he
did this the warning light on his radar gun sight blinked on,
indicating that something solid was in front of him--he wasn't
photographing a sundog, hallucination, or refracted light.

The two pilots broke off the intercept and started back to Wright-
Patterson when they suddenly realized that they were still northwest
of the base, in almost the same location they had been when they
started the intercept ten minutes before. The UFO had evidently
slowed down from the speed that the radar had measured, 525 miles an
hour, until it was hovering almost completely motionless.

As soon as the pilots were on the ground, the magazine of film from
the gun camera was rushed to the photo lab and developed. The photos
showed only a round, indistinct blob--no details--but they were proof
that some type of unidentified flying object had been in the air
north of Dayton.

Lieutenant Andy Flues was assigned to this one. He checked the
locations of balloons and found out that a 20-foot-diameter
radiosonde weather balloon from Wright-Patterson had been very near
the area when the unsuccessful intercept took place, but the balloon
wasn't traveling 525 miles an hour and it couldn't be picked up by
the ground radar, so he investigated further. The UFO couldn't have
been another airplane because airplanes don't hover in one spot and
it was no atmospheric phenomenon. Andy wrote it off as an unknown but
it still bothered him; that balloon in the area was mighty
suspicious. He talked to the two pilots a half dozen times and spent
a day at the radar site at Bellefontaine before he reversed his
"Unknown" decision and came up with the answer.

The unidentified target that the radar had tracked across Ohio was a
low-flying jet. The jet was unidentified because there was a mix-up
and the radar station didn't get its flight plan. Andy checked and
found that a jet out of Cleveland had landed at Memphis at about
eleven-forty. At ten forty-five this jet would have been north of
Dayton on a southwesterly heading. When the ground controller blended
the targets of the two F-86's into the unidentified target, they were
at 30,000 feet and were looking for the target at their altitude or
higher so they missed the low-flying jet--but they did see the
balloon. Since the radar went out just as the pilots saw the balloon,
the ground controller couldn't see that the