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He kept pounding home his idea that the pilot was "psycho" and used a few examples of what the report called "minor incidents" to justify his stand. Finally the pilot who had been flying with the "accused" man was called in. He said that he had been monitoring the tactical radio channel but that he hadn't heard any calls from his buddy's low- flying F-86.
A few seconds later he realized that it couldn't be a balloon because it was staying ahead of him. Quite an achievement for a balloon, since he had built up a lot of speed in his dive and now was flying almost straight and level at 3,000 feet and was traveling "at the Mach." Again the pilot pushed the nose of the F-86 down and started after the object.
By this time one remaining F-86 had been alerted and was airborne toward Long Beach. He passed the four homeward-bound F-86's as he was going in, but by the time he arrived over Long Beach the UFO was gone. All the pilots except one reported a "silver airplane with highly swept-back wings." One pilot said the UFO looked round and silver to him.
Quickly charging his guns, he started shooting. . . . A moment later the object pulled up into a climb and in a few seconds it was gone. The pilot climbed to 10,000 feet, called the other F-86, and now was able to contact his buddy. They joined up and went back to their base. As soon as he had landed and parked, the F-86 pilot went into operations to tell his story to his squadron commander.
In the summer of 1952 a United States Air Force F-86 jet interceptor shot at a flying saucer. This fact, like so many others that make up the full flying saucer story, has never before been told. There is a fighter base in the United States which I used to visit frequently because, during 1951, 1952, and 1953, it got more than its share of good UFO reports.
They went to their maximum altitude but they couldn't reach the UFO. After ten minutes of unsuccessful attempts to identify the huge silver sphere or disk because at times it looked like a disk one of the pilots hauled the nose of his F-86 up in a stall and exposed several feet of gun camera film.
The report ended with a comment by the local intelligence officer. He'd called Edwards AFB, the big Air Force test base north of Los Angeles, but they had nothing in the air. The officer concluded that the UFO was no airplane. In 1951 nothing we had would fly higher than the F-86. This was a good report and I decided to dig in. First I had some more questions I wanted to ask the pilots.
It said that early on the morning of August 26, only a few hours after the Lubbock sighting, two different radars had shown a target traveling 900 miles per hour at 13,000 feet on a northwesterly heading. The target had been observed for six minutes and an F-86 jet interceptor had been scrambled but by the time the F- 86 had climbed into the air the target was gone.
He told me that he had been flying an F-86 on a "round-robin" navigation flight from Moody AFB to Lawson AFB to Robins AFB, then back to Moody all in Georgia. At exactly nine thirty-five he was at 6,000 feet, heading toward Lawson AFB on the first leg of his flight.
It must be an airplane then, he'd decided an airplane so far away that he couldn't see its red and green wing tip lights. Since he'd gone this far, he decided that he'd get closer and make sure it was an airplane; so he dropped the nose of the F-86 and started down.
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