by an electrical spark. This
was all the lab could find.

During our previous visit we repeatedly asked the question, "Was the
hat burned before you went into the woods?" and, "Had the cap been
ironed?" We had received the same answers each time: "The hat was not
burned because we [the boy scouts] were playing with it at the scout
meeting and would have noticed the burns," and, "The cap was new; it
had not been washed or ironed." It is rumored that the cap was never
returned because it was proof of the authenticity of the sighting.
The hat wasn't returned simply because the scoutmaster said that he
didn't want it back. No secrets, no intrigue; it's as simple as that.

Everyone who was familiar with the incident, except a few people in
the Pentagon, were convinced that this was a hoax until the lab
called me about the grass samples we'd sent in. "How did the roots
get charred?" Roots charred? I didn't even know what my caller was
talking about. He explained that when they'd examined the grass they
had knocked the dirt and sand off the roots of the grass clumps and
found them charred. The blades of grass themselves were not damaged;
they had never been heated, except on the extreme tips of the longer
blades. These had evidently been bending over touching the ground and
were also charred. The lab had duplicated the charring and had found
that by placing live grass clumps in a pan of sand and dirt and
heating it to about 300 degrees F. over a gas burner the charring
could be duplicated. How it was actually done outside the lab they
couldn't even guess.

As soon as we got the lab report, we checked a few possibilities
ourselves. There were no hot underground springs to heat the earth,
no chemicals in the soil, not a thing we found could explain it. The
only way it could have been faked would have been to heat the earth
from underneath to 300 degrees F., and how do you do this without
using big and cumbersome equipment and disturbing the ground? You
can't. Only a few people handled the grass specimens: the lab, the
intelligence officer in Florida, and I. The lab wouldn't do it as a
joke, then write an official report, and I didn't do it. This leaves
the intelligence officer; I'm positive that he wouldn't do it. There
may be a single answer everyone is overlooking, but as of now the
charred grass roots from Florida are still a mystery.

Writing an official report on this incident was difficult. On one
side of the ledger