ocations. The fourth time the phone rang the call was from
the base radar station. They were picking up a UFO on radar, so the
boss himself took off. He saw the UFO in air out over Mobile Bay and
he saw the return of the UFO on the radarscope.

The next morning he called me at ATIC and for over an hour he told
me what had happened. Never have I talked to four more ardent flying
saucer believers.

We did quite a bit of work on the combination radar-visual sighting
at Brookley. First of all, radar-visual sightings were the best type
of UFO sightings we received. There are no explanations for how radar
can pick up a UFO target that is being watched visually at the same
time. Maybe I should have said there are no proven explanations on
how this can happen, because, like everything else associated with
the UFO, there was a theory. During the Washington National Sightings
several people proposed the idea that the same temperature-inversion
layer that was causing the radar beam to bend down and pick up a
ground target was causing the target to appear to be in the air. They
went on to say that we couldn't get a radar-visual sighting unless
the ground target was a truck, car, house, or something else that was
lighted and could be seen at a great distance. The second reason the
Brookley AFB sighting was so interesting was that it knocked this
theory cold.

The radar at Brookley AFB was so located that part of the area that
it scanned was over Mobile Bay. It was in this area that the UFO was
detected. We thought of the theory that the same inversion layer that
bent the radar beam also caused the target to appear to be in the
air, and we began to do a little checking. There was a slight
inversion but, according to our calculations, it wasn't enough to
affect the radar. More important was the fact that in the area where
the target appeared there were no targets to pick up--let alone
lighted targets. We checked and rechecked and found that at the time
of the sighting there were no ships, buoys, or anything else that
would give a radar return in the area of Mobile Bay in which we were
interested.

Although this sighting wasn't as glamorous as some we had, it was
highly significant because it was possible to show that the UFO
couldn't have been a lighted surface target.

While we were investigating the sighting we talked to several
electronics specialists about our radar-visual sightings. One of the
most frequent comments we hea