ormations of lights
flying through the night sky. At first the lights were reported every
three or four nights, but inside of two weeks the frequency had
stepped up. Before long they were a nightly occurrence. Some patrols
reported that they had seen three or four formations in one night.
The sightings weren't restricted to the men on patrol. One night,
just at dusk, during retreat, the entire garrison watched a formation
pass directly over the post parade ground.

As usual with UFO reports, the descriptions of the lights varied but
the majority of the observers reported a V formation of three lights.
As the formation moved through the sky, the lights changed in color
from a bluish white to orange and back to bluish white. This color
cycle took about two seconds. The lights usually traveled from west
to east and made no sound. They didn't streak across the sky like a
meteor, but they were "going faster than a jet." The lights were "a
little bigger than the biggest star." Once in a while the GI's would
get binoculars on them but they couldn't see any more details. The
lights just looked bigger.

From the time of the first sighting, reports of the little lights
were being sent to the Air Force through Army Intelligence channels.
The reports were getting to ATIC, but the green fireball activity was
taking top billing and no comments went back to the Army about their
little lights. According to an Army G-2 major to whom I talked in the
Pentagon, this silence was taken to mean that no action, other than
sending in reports, was necessary on the part of the Army.

But after about two weeks of nightly sightings and no apparent
action by the Air Force, the commander of the installation decided to
take the initiative and set a trap. His staff worked out a plan in
record time. Special UFO patrols would be sent out into the security
area and they would be furnished with sighting equipment. This could
be the equipment that they normally used for fire control. Each
patrol would be sent to a specific location and would set up a
command post. Operating out of the command post, at points where the
sky could be observed, would be sighting teams. Each team had
sighting equipment to measure the elevation and azimuth angle of the
UFO. Four men were to be on each team, an instrument man, a timer, a
recorder, and a radio operator. All the UFO patrols would be assigned
special radio frequencies.

The operating procedure would be that when