looded, so they drove out to look at it. Then they started
south toward a nearby town to take another of the boys home. They
took a black-top road about 10 miles inland from the heavily traveled
coastal highway that passes through sparsely settled areas of scrub
pine and palmetto thickets.

They were riding along when the scoutmaster said that he noticed a
light off to his left in the pines. He slowed down and asked the boys
if they'd seen it; none of them had. He started to drive on, when he
saw the lights again. This time all of the boys saw them too, so he
stopped. He said that he wanted to go back into the woods to see what
was going on, but that the boys were afraid to stay alone. Again he
started to drive on, but in a few seconds decided he had to go back.
So he turned the car around, went back, and parked beside the road at
a point just opposite where he'd seen the lights.

I stopped him at this point to find out a little bit more about why
he'd decided to go back. People normally didn't go running off into
palmetto thickets infested with rattlesnakes at night. He had a
logical answer. The lights looked like an airplane crashing into the
woods some distance away. He didn't believe that was what he saw, but
the thought that this could be a possibility bothered him. After all,
he had said, he was a scoutmaster, and if somebody was in trouble,
his conscience would have bothered him the rest of his life if he
hadn't investigated and it had been somebody in need of help.

A fifteen-minute radio program had just started, and he told the
boys that he was going to go into the woods, and that if he wasn't
back by the time the program ended they should run down the road to a
farmhouse that they had passed and get help. He got out and started
directly into the woods, wearing a faded denim billed cap and
carrying machete and two flashlights. One of the lights was a spare
he carried in his back pocket.

He had traveled about 50 yards off the road when he ran into a
palmetto thicket, so he stopped and looked for a clear path. But
finding none, he started pushing his way through the waist-high
tangle of brush.

When he stopped, he recalled later, he had first become aware of an
odd odor. He couldn't exactly describe it to us, except to say that
it was "sharp" or "pungent." It was very faint, actually more like a
subconscious awareness at first. Another sensation he recalled after
the incident was a very slight difference