Ice-laden clouds can cause a
radar return. The group of intelligence specialists at the meeting
decided that this was further proved by the fact that as the F-51's
approached the center of the cloud their radar return appeared to
approach the UFO target on the radarscope. They were near the UFO and
near ice, so the UFO must have been ice.

The case was closed.

I had read the report of this sighting but I hadn't paid too much
attention to it because it had been "solved." But one day almost two
years later I got a telephone call at my office at Project Blue Book.
It was a master sergeant, the master sergeant who had been operating
the radar at the lab. He'd just heard that the Air Force was again
seriously investigating UFO's and he wanted to see what had been said
about the Dayton Incident. He came over, read the report, and
violently disagreed with what had been decided upon as the answer. He
said that he'd been working with radar before World War II; he'd
helped with the operational tests on the first microwave warning
radars developed early in the war by a group headed by Dr. Luis
Alvarez. He said that what he saw on that radarscope was no ice
cloud; it was some type of aircraft. He'd seen every conceivable type
of weather target on radar, he told me; thunderstorms, ice-laden
clouds, targets caused by temperature inversions, and the works. They
all had similar characteristics--the target was "fuzzy" and varied in
intensity. But in this case the target was a good, solid return and
he was convinced that it was caused by a good, solid object. And
besides, he said, when the target began to fade on his scope he had
raised the tilt of the antenna and the target came back, indicating
that whatever it was, it was climbing. Ice-laden clouds don't climb,
he commented rather bitterly.

Nor did the pilot of one of the F-51's agree with the ATIC analysis.
The pilot who had been leading the two-ship flight of F-51's on that
day told me that what he saw was no planet. While he and his wing man
were climbing, and before the clouds obscured it, they both got a
good look at the UFO, and it was getting bigger and more distinct all
the time. As they climbed, the light began to take on a shape; it was
definitely round. And if it had been Venus it should have been in the
same part of the sky the next day, but the pilot said that he'd
looked and it wasn't there. The ATIC report doesn't mention this point.

I remember asking him a seco