flying above him somewhere
in the area at 20,000 feet. He called two or three times but could
get no answer. Next he tried to call the ground controller but he was
too low for his radio to carry that far. Once more he tried his buddy
at 20,000 feet, but again no luck.

By now he had been following the object for about two minutes and
during this time had closed the gap between them to approximately 500
yards. But this was only momentary. Suddenly the object began to pull
away, slowly at first, then faster. The pilot, realizing that he
couldn't catch _it_, wondered what to do next.

When the object traveled out about 1,000 yards, the pilot suddenly
made up his mind--he did the only thing that he could do to stop the
UFO. It was like a David about to do battle with a Goliath, but he
had to take a chance. Quickly charging his guns, he started shooting.
. . . A moment later the object pulled up into a climb and in a few
seconds it was gone. The pilot climbed to 10,000 feet, called the
other F-86, and now was able to contact his buddy. They joined up and
went back to their base.

As soon as he had landed and parked, the F-86 pilot went into
operations to tell his story to his squadron commander. The mere fact
that he had fired his guns was enough to require a detailed report,
as a matter of routine. But the circumstances under which the guns
actually were fired created a major disturbance at the fighter base
that day.

After the squadron commander had heard his pilot's story, he called
the group commander, the colonel, and the intelligence officer. They
heard the pilot's story.

For some obscure reason there was a "personality clash," the
intelligence officer's term, between the pilot and the squadron
commander. This was obvious, according to the report I was reading,
because the squadron commander immediately began to tear the story
apart and accuse the pilot of "cracking up," or of just "shooting his
guns for the hell of it and using the wild story as a cover-up."

Other pilots in the squadron, friends of the accused pilot--
including the intelligence officer and a flight surgeon--were called
in to "testify." All of these men were aware of the fact that in
certain instances a pilot can "flip" for no good reason, but none of
them said that he had noticed any symptoms of mental crack-up in the
unhappy pilot.

None, except the squadron commander. He kept pounding home his idea--
that the pilot was "psycho"--and used