rough-appearing on top, were seen silhouetted against the sunset
shortly after the plane took off from Boise at 8:04P.M. We saw them
clearly. We followed them in a northeasterly direction for about 45
miles. They finally disappeared. We were unable to tell whether they
outsped us or disintegrated. We can't say whether they were
"smearlike," oval, or anything else but whatever they were they were
not aircraft, clouds or smoke.

Civilians did not have a corner on the market. On July 6 a staff
sergeant in Birmingham, Alabama, saw several "dim, glowing lights"
speeding across the sky and photographed one of them. Also on the
sixth the crew of an Air Force B-25 saw a bright, disk-shaped object
"low at nine o'clock." This is one of the few reports of an object
lower than the aircraft. At Fairfield-Suisun AFB in California a
pilot saw something travel three quarters of the way across the sky
in a few seconds. It, too, was oscillating on its lateral axis.

According to the old hands at ATIC, the first sighting that really
made the Air Force take a deep interest in UFO's occurred on July 8
at Muroc Air Base (now Edwards AFB), the supersecret Air Force test
center in the Mojave Desert of California. At 10:10A.M. a test pilot
was running up the engine of the then new XP-84 in preparation for a
test flight. He happened to look up and to the north he saw what
first appeared to be a weather balloon traveling in a westerly
direction. After watching it a few seconds, he changed his mind. He
had been briefed on the high-altitude winds, and the object he saw
was going against the wind. Had it been the size of a normal
aircraft, the test pilot estimated that it would have been at 10,000
to 12,000 feet and traveling 200 to 225 miles per hour. He described
the object as being spherically shaped and yellowish white in color.