sional ability, he just wasn't convinced. But he did strongly
urge me to get in touch with Dr. La Paz and hear his side of the story.

When I returned to ATIC I spent several days digging into our
collection of green fireball reports. All of these reports covered a
period from early December 1948 to 1949. As far as Blue Book's files
were concerned, there hadn't been a green fireball report for a year
and a half.

I read over the report on Project Twinkle and the few notes we had
on the Los Alamos Conference, and decided that the next time I went
to Albuquerque I'd contact Dr. La Paz. I did go to Albuquerque
several times but my visits were always short and I was always in a
hurry so I didn't get to see him.

It was six or eight months later before the subject of green
fireballs came up again. I was eating lunch with a group of people at
the AEC's Los Alamos Laboratory when one of the group mentioned the
mysterious kelly-green balls of fire. The strictly unofficial bull-
session-type discussion that followed took up the entire lunch hour
and several hours of the afternoon. It was an interesting discussion
because these people, all scientists and technicians from the lab,
had a few educated guesses as to what they might be. All of them had
seen a green fireball, some of them had seen several.

One of the men, a private pilot, had encountered a fireball one
night while he was flying his Navion north of Santa Fe and he had a
vivid way of explaining what he'd seen. "Take a soft ball and paint
it with some kind of fluorescent paint that will glow a bright green
in the dark," I remember his saying, "then have someone take the ball
out about 100 feet in front of you and about 10 feet above you. Have
him throw the ball right at your face, as hard as he can throw it.
That's what a green fireball looks like."

The speculation about what the green fireballs were ran through the
usual spectrum of answers, a new type of natural phenomenon, a secret
U.S. development, and psychologically enlarged meteors. When the
possibility of the green fireballs' being associated with
interplanetary vehicles came up, the whole group got serious. They
had been doing a lot of thinking about this, they said, and they had
a theory.

The green fireballs, they theorized, could be some type of unmanned
test vehicle that was being projected into our atmosphere from a
"spaceship" hovering several hundred miles above the earth. Two years
ago I would h