would see
anything.

They drove to a hill in the north part of the city where they could
get a good view of the sky and parked. In a few minutes an Arkansas
City police car joined them.

It was a clear night except for a few wispy clouds scattered across
the north sky.

They waited, they looked and they saw.

Shortly before midnight, off to the north, appeared "a brilliantly
lighted, teardrop shaped, blob of light." "Prongs, or streams of
bright light, sprayed downward from the blob toward the earth." It
was big, about the size of a 200 watt light bulb.

As the group of men silently watched, the weird light continued to
drift and for many minutes it moved vertically and horizontally over
a wide area of the sky. Then it faded away.

As one of the men later told me, "I was glad to see it go; I was
pooped."

The next morning literally hundreds of people spent hours
conjecturing and describing. After all these years of talk they'd
actually seen one. Several photos, showing the big blob of light,
were shown around, and two fishermen readily admitted they'd packed
up their poles and tackle boxes and headed home when they saw it.

Editor Coyne summed up the feeling of hundreds of Kansans when he
said: "I have tended to discount the stories about flying objects,
but, brother, I am now a believer."

What was it? First of all it was confusion. Early the next morning
Air Force investigators flooded the area asking _the_ questions:
"What size was it in comparison to a key or a dime?" "Would it
compare in size to a light bulb?" "Was there any noise?"

As soon as they left, the military tersely announced that no radar
had picked up any target and no B-47's had been sent out. Then they
pulled the plugs on the incoming phone lines. The confusion mounted
when newsmen tapped their private sources and learned that a B-47
_had_ been sent into the area.

A few days later the Air Force told the Kansans what they'd seen:
The reflection from burning waste gas torches in a local oil field.

This was greeted with the Kansan version of the Bronx Cheer.

Nineteen hundred fifty-six was a big year for Project Blue Book.
According to an old friend, Captain George Gregory, who was then
Chief of Blue Book, they received 778 reports. And through a lot of
sleepless nights they were able to "solve" 97.8% of them. Only 17
remained "unknowns."

Digging through the reports for 1956, outside of the ones already
mentioned, there were few re