hington, D.C., along with the
scoutmaster's story. Our question here was, "Does the cap in any way
(burns, chemicals, etc.) substantiate or refute the story?"

I thought that we'd collected all the items that could be analyzed
in a lab until somebody thought of one I'd missed, the most obvious
of them all--soil and grass samples from under the spot where the UFO
had hovered. We'd had samples, but in the last-minute rush to get
back to Dayton they had been left in Florida. I called Florida and
they were shipped to Dayton and turned over to an agronomy lab for
analysis.

By the end of the week I received a report on our ex-Marine's
military and reformatory records. They confirmed a few suspicions and
added new facts. They were not complimentary. The discrepancy between
what we'd heard about the scoutmaster while we were in Florida and
the records was considered a major factor. I decided that we should
go back to Florida and try to resolve this discrepancy.

Since it was hurricane season, we had to wait a few days, then sneak
back between two hurricanes. We contacted a dozen people in the city
where the scoutmaster lived. All of them had known him for some time.
We traced him from his early boyhood to the time of the sighting. To
be sure that the people we talked to were reliable, we checked on
them. The specific things we found out cannot be told since they were
given to us in confidence, but we were convinced that the whole
incident was a hoax.

We didn't talk to the scoutmaster again but we did talk to all the
boy scouts one night at their scout meeting, and they retold how they
had seen their scoutmaster knocked down by the ball of fire. The
night before, we had gone out to the area of the sighting and, under
approximately the same lighting conditions as existed on the night of
the sighting, had re-enacted the scene--especially the part where the
boy scouts saw their scoutmaster fall, covered with red fire. We
found that not even by standing _on_ _top_ _of_ _the_ _car_ could you
see a person silhouetted in the clearing where the scoutmaster
supposedly fell. The rest of their stories fell apart to some extent
too. They were not as positive of details as they had been previously.

When we returned to Dayton, the report on the cap had come back. The
pattern of the scorch showed that the hat was flat when it was
scorched, but the burned holes--the lab found some minute holes we
had missed--had very probably been made