scramble interceptors but there were no more radar
contacts and a jet interceptor without ground guidance is worthless.

At the height of this activity it was decided that more information
was needed by the Air Defense Command. Maybe from a mass of data
something, some kind of clue, could be sifted out. The answer:
establish a special UFO reporting post. The man to operate this post
was tailor-made.

On September 9, Major Hugh McKenzie of the Columbus Filter Center
contacted Leonard H. Stringfield in Cincinnati. Stringfield, besides
being a very public minded citizen, was also known as a level-headed
"saucer expert." Sooner or later, usually sooner, he heard about
every UFO sighting in Hamilton County. He was given a code, "Foxtrot
Kilo 3-0 Blue," which provided him with an open telephone line to the
ADC Filter Center in Columbus. He was in business but he didn't have
to build up a clientele--it was there.

For the next few months Stringfield did yeoman duty as Cincinnati's
one-man UFO center by sifting out the wheat from the chaff and
passing the wheat on to the Air Force. As he told me the other day,
half his nights were spent in his backyard clad in shorts and
binoculars. Fortunately his neighbors were broad-minded and the UFO's
picked relatively warm nights to appear.

Most of the reports Stringfield received were duds. He lost track of
the number. The green, red, blue, gold and white; discs, triangles,
squares and footballs which hovered, streaked, zigzagged and jerked,
turned out to be Venus, Jupiter, Arcturus and an occasional jet. A
fiery orange satellite which hovered for hours turned out to be the
North Star viewed through a cheap telescope, and the "whole formation
of space ships" were the Pleiades.

Then it happened again.

On the evening of March 23rd Stringfield's telephone rang. It was
Charles Deininger at the Mt. Healthy GOC post. They had a UFO in
sight off to the east. Could Stringfield see it? He grabbed his
extension phone and ran outdoors. There, off to the east, were two,
large, low flying lights. One of the lights was a glowing green and
the other yellow. They were moving north.

"Airplane!"

This was Stringfield's first reaction but during World War II he had
made the long trek up the Pacific with the famous Fifth Air Force and
he immediately realized that if it was an airplane it would have to
be very close because of the large distance between the lights. And,
as a clincher, no sound