unidentified target he'd
been watching was continuing on to the southwest. The pilots didn't
bother to look around any more once they'd spotted the balloon
because they thought they had the target in sight.

The only part of the sighting that still wasn't explained was the
radar pickup on the F-86's gun sight. Lieutenant Flues checked
around, did a little experimenting, and found out that the small
transmitter box on a radiosonde balloon will give an indication on
the radar used in F-86 gun sights.

To get a final bit of proof, Lieutenant Flues took the gun camera
photos to the photo lab. The two F-86's had been at about 40,000 feet
when the photos were taken and the 20-foot balloon was at about
70,000 feet. Andy's question to the photo lab was, "How big should a
20-foot balloon appear on a frame of 16-mm. movie film when the
balloon is 30,000 feet away?"

The people in the photo lab made a few calculations and measurements
and came up with the answer, "A 20-foot balloon photographed from
30,000 feet away would be the same size as the UFO in the gun camera
photos."

By the middle of August, Project Blue Book was back to normal.
Lieutenant Flues's Coca-Cola consumption had dropped from twenty
bottles a day in mid-July to his normal five. We were all getting a
good night's sleep and it was now a rare occasion when my home
telephone would ring in the middle of the night to report a new UFO.

But then on the morning of August 20 I was happily taking a shower,
getting ready to go to work, when one of these rare occasions
occurred and the phone rang--it was the ATIC OD. An operational
immediate wire had just come in for Blue Book. He had gone over to
the message center and gotten it. He thought that it was important
and wanted me to come right out. For some reason he didn't want to
read it over the phone, although it was not classified. I decided
that if he said so I should come out, so I left in a hurry.

The wire was from the intelligence officer at an air base in
Florida. The previous night a scoutmaster and three boy scouts had
seen a UFO. The scoutmaster had been burned when he approached too
close to the UFO. The wire went on to give a few sketchy details and
state that the scoutmaster was a "solid citizen."

I immediately put in a long-distance call to the intelligence
officer. He confirmed the data in the wire. He had talked briefly to
the scoutmaster on the phone and from all he could gather it was no
hoax.