◆ SpookStack

Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010002-9 At that time the American public might not have been prepared for any other conclusion, but the flood of reports that followed hot on the heels of the Arnold sighting was to sew doubt in the minds of many of those who had dis- missed this initial “saucer” as a misconception. There was a report the next month from a test pilot at what is now Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mo- jave Desert. He watched what he thought was a weather balloon until he saw that it was going against the wind. He described it as spherical in shape, yellow-white in color. Two hours later, in the same neighborhood, a crew of tech- nicians sighted what they thought was a parachute can- opy. Then they realized it was traveling too fast for a test parachute, and against the wind. It was soundless, had no Pilots are more certain of their sightings than others. Here two swear to “pinkish-pancake” object. visible means of propulsion and, after 90 seconds, disap- peared behind mountains. Their opinions, based on the shape and functional appearance, was that the object was man-made. One year later, in July of 1948, a pilot flying a com- mercial airliner from Houston, Tex. to Atlanta, Ga., saw a bright light closing in on him so fast that he knew it could not be a jet. He nudged his co-pilot, then wheeled in a tight left turn as the object spun off 700 feet to the right. The pilots described a deep blue glowing underside, two rows of glowing windows and a 50-foot trail of red- orange flame. The only passenger who witnessed the inci- dent saw “a strange, eerie streak of light, very intense.” When the crew chief at the Air Force Base near Macon, Ga., reported seeing a bright light in the same vicinity, traveling at tremendous speed, and a pilot over the Vir- ginia-North Carolina line reported a “bright shooting star” at the same time over Montgomery, Ala., the ATIC took notice. After investigation they summed up the glowing fast-traveler as a meteor. Major Donald Keyhoe, in his Fly- ing Saucers From Outer Space, has reported that the project analyst himself was not happy with this summation and allowed that it “seems very improbable.” That the ultimate conclusions on what UFO sighters have seen should rest with the Air Force has proved dis- | quieting to many observers and particularly unsettling to experienced pilots who feel that they are sufficiently fa- miliar with known air craft and with the constellations not to be bamboozled into easy mistakes. A case in point is that of Captain Peter Killian, flying an American Air- lines cargo plane from Newark to Detroit in February, 1959. What he saw were three brightly lighted UFOs that kept pace with his plane, changing position as they moved. What he was told he saw was a military tanker refueling some jets. Other air crews in the area had reported seeing the same objects. It is not easy to conyince veteran pilots that they have been fooled into mistaking fueling tankers and jets for UFOs. So the Air Force offered another con- clusion: the constellation Orion. But how to explain the stars in Orion changing formation. For Captain Killian, those UFOs are unexplained. Coral Lorenzen, who with her husband L. J. Lorenzen, direct the activities of the highly reputable Aerial Phe- nomena Research Orgainzation in Tucson, Ariz., has cited the experience of another far from satisfied pilot in her well researched book Flying Saucers: The Startling Evi- dence of The Invasion From Outer Space. It was APRO’s investigation of a 1961 sighting near Salt Lake City, Utah, that familiarized her with the aspects of Pilot Waldo J. Harris’ frustrating brush with the Air Force. Harris, who from the ground had seen what he thought was a plane in the sky as he was‘about to take off on a routine flight around noon of October 2, 1961, was sur- prised when he got aloft to see that the object was still in the same position as it had been when he first saw it. Puz- zled, he headed for it and saw what he described as a large disc, undulating at an altitude of some 6500 feet. His radioed report to the airport brought out several inter- ested spectators who trained their binoculars on the maneu- Approved For Release 2001/04/02 : CIA-RDP81R00560R000100010002-9