four in the metal tank knew about events outside of their own
experience.

But much was happening outside. Troop-carrying trucks had reached the
edge of Boulder Lake National Park, a very few hours after the workmen
from the camp had gotten out of it. They had a story to tell, and if
it lacked detail it did not lack imagination. The three missing men
had their fate described in various versions, all of which were
dramatic and terrifying. The two men who had been paralyzed by some
unknown agency described their sensations after their release. Their
stories were immediately relayed to all the news media. It now
appeared that dozens of men had seen the thing descend from the sky.
They had not compared notes, however, and their descriptions varied
from a black pear-shaped globe which had hovered for minutes before
descending behind the mountains into the lake, to detailed word
pictures of a silvery, torpedo-shaped vessel of space with portholes
and flaming rockets and an unknown flag displayed from a flagstaff.

Of course, none of those accounts could be right. The velocity of the
falling object, as reported from two radar installations, checked
against a seismograph record of the time of the impact in the lake and
allowed no leeway of time for it to hover in mid-air to be admired.

But there were enough detailed and first-hand accounts of alarming
events to make a second statement by the Defense Department necessary.
It was an over-correction of the first soothing one. It was intended
to be more soothing still.

It said blandly that a bolide--a slow-moving, large meteoric
object--had been observed by radar to be descending to earth. It had