nd time what the UFO looked like; he
said, "huge and metallic"--shades of the Mantell Incident.

The Dayton Incident didn't get much of a play from the press because
officially it wasn't an unknown and there's nothing intriguing about
an ice cloud and Venus. There were UFO reports in the newspapers,
however.

One story that was widely printed was about a sighting at the naval
air station at Dallas, Texas. Just before noon on March 16, Chief
Petty Officer Charles Lewis saw a disk-shaped UFO come streaking
across the sky and buzz a high-flying B-36. Lewis first saw the UFO
coming in from the north, lower than the B-36; then he saw it pull up
to the big bomber as it got closer. It hovered under the B-36 for an
instant, then it went speeding off and disappeared. When the press
inquired about the incident, Captain M. A. Nation, commander of the
air station, vouched for his chief and added that the base tower
operators had seen and reported a UFO to him about ten days before.

This story didn't run long because the next day a bigger one broke
when the sky over the little town of Farmington, New Mexico, about
170 miles northwest of Albuquerque, was literally invaded by UFO's.
Every major newspaper carried the story. The UFO's had apparently
been congregating over the four corners area for two days because
several people had reported seeing UFO's on March 15 and 16. But the
seventeenth was the big day, every saucer this side of Polaris must
have made a successful rendezvous over Farmington, because on that
day most of the town's 3,600 citizens saw the mass fly-by. The first
reports were made at 10:15A.M.; then for an hour the air was full of
flying saucers. Estimates of the number varied from a conservative
500 to "thousands." Most all the observers said the UFO's were saucer-
shaped, traveled at almost unbelievable speeds, and didn't seem to
have any set flight path. They would dart in and out and seemed to
avoid collisions only by inches. There was no doubt that they weren't
hallucinations because the mayor, the local newspaper staff, ex-
pilots, the highway patrol, and every type of person who makes up a
community of 3,600 saw them.

I've talked to several people who were in Farmington and saw this
now famous UFO display of St. Patrick's Day, 1950. I've heard dozens
of explanations--cotton blowing in the wind, bugs' wings reflecting
sunlight, a hoax to put Farmington on the map, and real honest-to-
goodness flying sauce