a Friday night and planned to leave early
Saturday morning. Bob Olsson and I planned to fly back on a
commercial airliner, as the B-25 was grounded for maintenance. Just
after dinner that night I got a call from the sheriff's office. It
was from a deputy I had talked to, not the one who met the
scoutmaster coming out of the woods, but another one, who had been
very interested in the incident. He had been doing a little
independent checking and found that our singed UFO observer's
background was not as clean as he led one to believe. He had been
booted out of the Marines after a few months for being AWOL and
stealing an automobile, and had spent some time in a federal
reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio. The deputy pointed out that this
fact alone meant nothing but that he thought I might be interested in
it. I agreed.

The next morning, early, I was awakened by a phone call from the
intelligence officer. The morning paper carried the UFO story on the
front page. It quoted the scoutmaster as saying that "high brass"
from Washington had questioned him late into the night. There was no
"high brass," just four captains, a second lieutenant, and a
sergeant. He knew we were from Dayton because we had discussed who we
were and where we were stationed. The newspaper story went on to say
that "he, the scoutmaster, and the Air Force knew what he'd seen but
he couldn't tell--it would create a national panic." He'd also hired
a press agent. I could understand the "high brass from the Pentagon"
as literary license by the press, but this "national panic" pitch was
too much. I had just about decided to give up on this incident and
write it off as "Unknown" until this happened. From all appearances,
our scoutmaster was going to make a fast buck on his experience. Just
before leaving for Dayton, I called Major Dewey Fournet in the
Pentagon and asked him to do some checking.

Monday morning the machete went to the materials lab at Wright-
Patterson. The question we asked was, "Is there anything unusual
about this machete? Is it magnetized? Is it radioactive? Has it been
heated?" No knife was ever tested so thoroughly for so many things.
As in using a Geiger counter to check the area over which the UFO had
hovered in the Florida woods, our idea was to investigate every
possible aspect of the sighting. They found nothing, just a plain,
unmagnetized, unradioactive, unheated, common, everyday knife.

The cap was sent to a laboratory in Was