was a huge mass of circumstantial evidence very
heavily weighted against the scoutmaster's story being true. On our
second trip to Florida, Lieutenant Olsson and I heard story after
story about the man's aptitude for dreaming up tall tales. One man
told us, "If he told me the sun was shining, I'd look up to make
sure." There were parts of his story and those of the boy scouts that
didn't quite mesh. None of us ever believed the boy scouts were in on
the hoax. They were undoubtedly so impressed by the story that they
imagined a few things they didn't actually see. The scoutmaster's
burns weren't proof of anything; the flight surgeon had duplicated
these by burning his own arm with a cigarette lighter. But we didn't
make step one in proving the incident to be a hoax. We thought up
dozens of ways that the man could have set up the hoax but couldn't
prove one.

In the scoutmaster's favor were the two pieces of physical evidence
we couldn't explain, the holes burned in the cap and the charred
grass roots.

The deputy sheriff who had first told me about the scoutmaster's
Marine and prison record had also said, "Maybe this is the one time
in his life he's telling the truth, but I doubt it."

So did we; we wrote off the incident as a hoax. The best hoax in UFO
history.

Many people have asked why we didn't give the scoutmaster a lie
detector test. We seriously considered it and consulted some experts
in this field. They advised against it. In some definite types of
cases the lie detector will not give valid results. This, they
thought, was one of those cases. Had we done it and had he passed on
the faulty results, the publicity would have been a headache.

There is one way to explain the charred grass roots, the burned cap,
and a few other aspects of the incident. It's pure speculation; I
don't believe that it is the answer, yet it is interesting. Since the
blades of the grass were not damaged and the ground had not been
disturbed, this one way is the only way (nobody has thought of any
other way) the soil could have been heated. It could have been done
by induction heating.

To quote from a section entitled "Induction Heating" from an
electrical engineering textbook:

A rod of solid metal or any electrical conductor, when subjected to
an alternating magnetic field, has electromotive forces set up in it.
These electromotive forces cause what are known as "eddy currents." A
rise in temperature results from "eddy curren