etent the man really was to try to pass off such an answer.

All in all, the unsolicited assistance of theorists didn't help us a
bit, I told the panel members. Some of them were evidently familiar
with the theories because they nodded their heads in agreement.

The next topic I covered in my briefing was a question that came up
quite frequently in discussions of the UFO: Did UFO reports actually
start in 1947? We had spent a great deal of time trying to resolve
this question. Old newspaper files, journals, and books that we found
in the Library of Congress contained many reports of odd things being
seen in the sky as far back as the Biblical times. The old Negro
spiritual says, "Ezekiel saw a wheel 'way up in the middle of the
air." We couldn't substantiate Ezekiel's sighting because many of the
very old reports of odd things observed in the sky could be explained
as natural phenomena that weren't fully understood in those days.

The first documented reports of sightings similar to the UFO
sightings as we know them today appeared in the newspapers of 1896.
In fact, the series of sightings that occurred in that year and the
next had many points of similarity with the reports of today.

The sightings started in the San Francisco Bay area on the evening
of November 22, 1896, when hundreds of people going home from work
saw a large, dark, "cigar-shaped object with stubby wings" traveling
northwest across Oakland.

Within hours after the mystery craft had disappeared over what is
now the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, the stories of people
in other northern California towns began to come in on the telegraph
wires. The citizens of Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Chico, and Red Bluff--
several thousand of them--saw it.

I tried to find out if the people in these outlying communities saw
the UFO before they heard the news from the San Francisco area or
afterward, but trying to run down the details of a fifty-six-year-old
UFO report is almost hopeless. Once while I was on a trip to Hamilton
AFB I called the offices of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ and they
put me in touch with a retired employee who had worked on a San
Francisco paper in 1896. I called the old gentleman on the phone and
talked to him for a long time. He had been a copy boy at the time and
remembered the incident, but time had canceled out the details. He
did tell me that he, the editor of the paper, and the news staff had
seen "the ship," as he referred