ost a
week to the hour from the first one, by a stroke of luck things
weren't too fouled up. The method of reporting the sighting didn't
exactly follow the official reporting procedures that are set forth
in Air Force Letter 200-5, dated 5 April 1952, Subject: Reporting of
Unidentified Flying Objects--but it worked.

I first heard about the sighting about ten o'clock in the evening
when I received a telephone call from Bob Ginna, _Life_ magazine's
UFO expert. He had gotten the word from _Life's_ Washington News
Bureau and wanted a statement about what the Air Force planned to do.
I decided that instead of giving a mysterious "no comment" I would
tell the truth: "I have no idea what the Air Force is doing; in all
probability it's doing nothing." When he hung up, I called the
intelligence duty officer in the Pentagon and I was correct,
intelligence hadn't heard about the sighting. I asked the duty
officer to call Major Fournet and ask him if he would go out to the
airport, which was only two or three miles from his home. When he got
the call from the duty officer Major Fournet called Lieutenant
Holcomb; they drove to the ARTC radar room at National Airport and
found Al Chop already there. So at this performance the UFO's had an
official audience; Al Chop, Major Dewey Fournet, and Lieutenant
Holcomb, a Navy electronics specialist assigned to the Air Force
Directorate of Intelligence, all saw the radar targets and heard the
radio conversations as jets tried to intercept the UFO's.

Being in Dayton, 380 miles away, there wasn't much that I could do,
but I did call Captain Roy James thinking possibly he might want to
talk on the phone to the people who were watching the UFO's on the
radarscopes. But Captain James has a powerful dislike for UFO's--
especially on Saturday night.

About five o'clock Sunday morning Major Fournet called and told me
the story of the second sighting at Washington National Airport:

About 10:30P.M. on July 26 the same radar operators who had seen the
UFO's the week before picked up several of the same slow-moving
targets. This time the mysterious craft, if that is what they were,
were spread out in an arc around Washington from Herndon, Virginia,
to Andrews AFB. This time there was no hesitation in following the
targets. The minute they appeared on the big 24-inch radarscope one
of the controllers placed a plastic marker representing an
unidentified target near each blip on the scope. When all t