"Saucer," I ran onto two sightings that were not on my list.

One of these had occurred in California, at Fairfield Suisan Air Force
Base. A Seattle man who had been stationed there gave me the details.
It was on the night of December 1918, with unusually high winds
sweeping across the airfield. At times the gusts reached almost
seventy miles an hour. Suddenly a weird ball of light flashed into
view, at a height of a thousand feet. As the men on the base watched
it, astonished, the mysterious light abruptly shot skyward. In an
incredibly short time, it reached an altitude of twenty thousand feet
and vanished.

"Was there any shape outlined behind the light?" I asked the Seattle
man.

"Nobody saw any," he replied. "It looked just like I said--a ball of
light, going like a streak."

"Did it leave any smoke behind it?"

"You mean like an engine, or a jet?" He shook his head. "Not a thing.
And it didn't make a sound--even when it shot up like that."

"Did you hear any guesses about it, or reports later on?"

"Some major who didn't see it said it must have been

{p. 80}

a balloon. Anybody with brains could see that was screwy. No balloon