tember 29th.

Shortly before dawn on that day a confusing mess of reports began to
pour into the Air Force. Some came from the Washington, D.C., area.
People right in NICAP's backyard told of seeing a "large, round,
fiery object" shoot across the sky from southeast to northwest. A few
excited observers, all from the country northwest of Washington, "had
seen it land" and even as they telephoned in their reports they could
see it glowing behind a neighbor's barn.

Other reports, also of a "huge, round, fiery object," came in from
such places as Pittsburgh, Somerset, and Bedford, all in
Pennsylvania; and Hagerstown and Frederick in Maryland. To add to the
confusion, people in Pennsylvania reported seeing three objects
"flying in formation."

When the dust settled Air Force investigators took the first step in
the solution of any UFO report. They plotted the sightings on a map,
and collated the directions of flight, descriptions and times of
observation. It was obvious that the object had moved along a line
between Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. It was traveling about 7000
miles an hour and everyone had obviously seen the same object. By the
time it had passed into Pennsylvania it had split into three objects.

But the hooker was the reported landings northeast of Washington.
Too many people had reported a glow on the ground to write this
factor off even though an investigator, dispatched to the scene
shortly after dawn, had found nothing in the way of evidence.

One possibility was that some unknown object had streaked across the
sky, landed and then took off again.

Could be, but it wasn't.

The next night the case broke. The glow from the landing was a
bright floodlight on a barn. No one had ever really noticed it before
until the object passed nearby.

A few days later the object itself was identified. From the many
identical descriptions Project Blue Book's astrophysicist pinned it
down as a large meteor. The meteor had broken up near the end of its
flight to produce the illusion of three objects flying in formation.

Of all the 590 UFO reports the Air Force received in 1958, probably
the weirdest was solved before it was ever reported.

About four o'clock on the afternoon of October 2, 1958, three men
were standing in a group, talking, outside a tungsten mill at Danby,
California, right in the heart of the Mojave Desert The men had been
talking for about five minutes when one of them, who happened to b