any balloons had been launched. He thought
that he might be seeing a balloon. The tower had told him that there
was a balloon in the area.

Then the commander took out an aeronautical chart and drew in his
flight path and the apparent path of the UFO for me. I think that he
drew it accurately because he had been continually watching landmarks
as he'd chased the UFO and was very careful as he drew the sketches
on the map.

I checked with the weather detachment at Mitchel and they said that
they had released a balloon. They had released it at nine-fifty and
from a point southeast of the airfield. I got a plot of its path.
Just as in the Long Beach Incident, where the six F-86's tried to
intercept the UFO, the balloon was almost exactly in line with the
spot where the UFO was first seen, but then any proof you might
attempt falls apart. If the pilot knew where he was, and had plotted
his flight path even semi-accurately, he was never over the balloon.
Yet he was over the UFO. He came within less than 2,000 feet of the
UFO when he passed over it; yet he couldn't recognize it as a balloon
even though he thought it might be a balloon since the tower had just
told him that there was one in the area. He said that he followed the
UFO around the north edge of the airfield. Yet the balloon, after it
was launched southeast of the field, continued on a southeast course
and never passed north of the airfield.

But the biggest argument against the object's being a balloon was
the fact that the pilot pulled in behind it; it was directly off the
nose of his airplane, and although he followed it for more than a
minute, it pulled away from him. Once you line up an airplane on a
balloon and go straight toward it you will catch it in a matter of
seconds, even in the slowest airplane. There have been dogfights with
UFO's where the UFO's turned out to be balloons, but the pilots
always reported that the UFO "made a pass" at them. In other words,
they rapidly caught up with the balloon and passed it. I questioned
this pilot over and over on this one point, and he was positive that
he had followed directly behind the UFO for over a minute and all the
time it was pulling away from him.

This is one of the most typical UFO reports we had in our files. It
is typical because no matter how you argue there isn't any definite
answer. If you want to argue that the pilot didn't know where he was
during the chase--that he was 3 or 4 miles from wher