{p. 77}

Guard. I can't tell you the order itself. It was confidential."

"Well, I'm not in the Guard," said Art Green. He lit a cigarette, blew
out the match. "Why don't you look into the Gorman case? Get thc dope
on that court-martial angle."

I'd heard of the Gorman case, but the court-martial thing was new to
me. Gorman, I recalled, was a fighter pilot in the North Dakota Air
National Guard. He had a mystifying encounter with a strange,
fast-moving "light" over Fargo Airport in the fall of 1948.

"That case is on my list," I told Green. "But I don't remember
anything about a court-martial."

"It wasn't in the papers. But all the pilots up that way know about
it. In his report, Gorman said something about trying to ram the
thing. The idea got around that Air Force orders had said to try this.
Anyway, it got into the papers and Gorman almost got court-martialed.
If his family hadn't had some influence in the state, the Air Force
probably would have pushed it."

"Are you sure about this?" I said. "You know how those things build
up."

"Ask Gorman," he said. "Or ask some of the pilots at Fargo."

Before I left them, Green double-checked my report on his sighting,