told me that one tracking
crew had seen so many that the sight of a UFO no longer even
especially interested them. And the things that they saw couldn't be
explained.

For example: On January 16, 1951, two people from General Mills and
four people from Artesia, New Mexico, were watching a skyhook balloon
from the Artesia airport. They had been watching the balloon off and
on for about an hour when one of the group saw two tiny specks on the
horizon, off to the northwest. He pointed them out to the others
because two airplanes were expected into the airport, and he thought
that these might be the airplanes. But as they watched, the two
specks began to move in fast, and within a few seconds the observers
could see that "the airplanes" were actually two round, dull white
objects flying in close formation. The two objects continued to come
in and headed straight toward the balloon. When they reached the
balloon they circled it once and flew off to the northwest, where
they disappeared over the horizon. As the two UFO's circled the
balloon, they tipped on edge and the observers saw that they were
disk-shaped.

When the two UFO's were near the balloon, the observers also had a
chance to compare the size of the UFO's with the size of the balloon.
If the UFO's were as close to the balloon as they appeared to be they
would have been 60 feet in diameter.

After my visit to General Mills, Inc., I couldn't help remembering a
magazine article I'd read about a year before. It said that there was
not a single reliable UFO report that couldn't be attributed to a
skyhook balloon.

I'd been back at ATIC only a few days when I found myself packing up
to leave again. This time it was for New York. A high-priority wire
had come into ATIC describing how a Navy pilot had chased a UFO over
Mitchel AFB, on Long Island. It was a good report.

I remember the trip to New York because my train passed through
Elizabeth, New Jersey, early in the morning, and I could see the
fires caused by an American Airlines Convair that had crashed. This
was the second of the three tragic Elizabeth, New Jersey, crashes.

The morning before, on January 21, a Navy pilot had taken off from
Mitchel in a TBM. He was a lieutenant commander, had flown in World
War II, and was now an engineer at the Navy Special Devices Center on
Long Island. At nine-fifty he had cleared the traffic pattern and was
at about 2,500 feet, circling around the airfield. He was southea