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The crew of the C-54, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators didn't recognize the UFO's as meteors because they were used to seeing the normal "shooting stars" that are most commonly seen. But the colonel had some more questions. "What are the chances of having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling the same direction, only five minutes apart?"

Off to the east of the airbase were three objects that can best be described as three half-sized suns. By the time I arrived at base operations there were three or four dozen people on the ramp, all looking up. The standard comment was: "Look at them go." About this time a C-54 transport taxied up and stopped. It was the "Kittyhawk Flight" from Washington and I knew several people who got off.

Secondly, I found out that the C-54, a slow airplane, had actually overtaken and passed the balloons between Columbus and Dayton but none of the passengers I talked to had stopped to think of this. And I'm positive that in our minds the balloons, which were about 40 feet in diameter and at 40,000 feet, looked a lot larger than they actually were.

I felt as if I were on a witness stand being cross-examined, and that is exactly where I was, because the colonel cut loose. "Why not assume a point that is more easily proved?" he asked. "Why not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators did know what they were talking about?

The C-54 was 200 miles southwest, coming into Goose AFB from Westover AFB, Massachusetts, when the incident occurred. The base officer-of-the-day, who was also a pilot, happened to be in the flight operations office at Goose when the message came in and he overheard the report.

Almost climbing over each other in their effort to tell their story they told me how they had watched the UFO's from the C-54. Both had seen them "dogfighting" between themselves. "How fast were they going?" I asked. "Like hell," was their only answer but the way they said it and the looks on their faces emphasized their statement.

As they closed in, the UFO seemed to lose altitude a little faster and "sank" into the top of the overcast. Just as the C-54 flashed across the spot where the UFO had disappeared, the crew saw it rise up out of the overcast off their right wing and begin to climb so fast that in several seconds it was out of sight.

He used the sighting from Goose AFB, where the fireball had buzzed the C-54 and sent the OD and his driver belly-whopping under the command car as an example. The colonel pointed out that even though we had labeled the report "Unknown" it wasn't accepted as proof. He wanted to know why.

It was an unknown. The incident started when the pilot of an Air Force C-54 transport radioed Goose AFB and said that at 10:42P.M. a large fireball had buzzed his airplane. It had come in from behind the C-54, and nobody had seen it until it was just off the left wing. The fireball was so big that the pilot said it looked as if it was only a few hundred feet away.

The four tower men kept watching the eastern sky, and suddenly the light began to reappear. It stayed in sight a few seconds, was gone again, and then for the third time it came back, heading toward the air base. This time one of the tower operators picked up a microphone, called the pilot of a C-54 that was crossing Tokyo Bay, and asked if he could see the light.