officer. They decided not to send the report and ordered it destroyed.

When I finished reading, the intelligence officer's first comment
was, "What do you think?"

Since the evaluation of the report seemed to hinge upon conflicts
between personalities I didn't know, I could venture no opinion,
except that the incident made up the most fascinating UFO report I'd
ever seen. So I batted the intelligence officer's question back to him.

"I know the people involved," he replied, "and I don't think the
pilot was nuts. I can't give you the report, because Colonel ------
told me to destroy it. But I did think you should know about it."
Later he burned the report.

The problems involved in this report are typical. There are certain
definite facts that can be gleaned from it; the pilot did see
something and he did shoot at something, but no matter how thoroughly
you investigate the incident that something can never be positively
identified. It might have been a hallucination or it might have been
some vehicle from outer space; no one will ever know. It was a UFO.

The UFO story started soon after June 24, 1947, when newspapers all
over the United States carried the first flying saucer report. The
story told how nine very bright, disk-shaped objects were seen by
Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, businessman, while he was flying his
private plane near Mount Rainier, in the state of Washington. With
journalistic license, reporters converted Arnold's description of the
individual motion of each of the objects--like "a saucer skipping
across water"--into "flying saucer," a name for the objects