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That night the 97th Fighter Interceptor Squadron added three more balloons to their record. The F-86's had been able to climb higher than the F-84's. The next morning photos confirmed the balloons. They had been tethered together and carried an instrument package. I had been fooled. Two Ph.D psychologists who had studied UFO's had been fooled.
When a ground radar picks up a UFO target and a ground observer sees a light where the radar target is located, then a jet interceptor is scrambled to intercept the UFO and the pilot also sees the light and gets a radar lock-on only to have the UFO almost impudently outdistance him, there is no simple answer.
Another object hurtled away toward the stars. "Fire three! Fire four!" Far away, something came plunging toward the ship. It did not travel in a straight line. It curved. It was not reasonable for a missile to travel in a curved line. The interceptor missiles had to detect it, swing to intercept, to accelerate furiously. The first interceptor missed. Worse, it had lost its target.
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.
They were rising to spread out as an interceptor screen for hundreds of miles in every direction, in case somebody should be so foolish as to try again the exploit of the night before. They would not see the monster in the Shed again. So in a single line which reached to the horizon, they made this roaring run for the one last glimpse which was their right.
Some of the crowd were talking about jet fighters and it suddenly dawned on me that just across the parking lot was the operations office of the local ADC jet outfit, the 97th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. I ran over to interceptor operations and went in. I knew the duty officer because several times before the 97th people had chased balloons over Dayton.
Just as the target entered the "ground clutter" the permanent and solid target near the radar station caused by the radar beam's striking the ground the lock-on was broken. The target seemed to pull away swiftly from the jet interceptor.
In fact, he had made a trip to both the radar site and the interceptor base just two days after the sighting, and he had talked about the sighting with the people who had seen the UFO on the radar. He wanted to know what we thought about it. When I told him that the sighting had been written off as weather, I remember that he got a funny look on his face and said, "Weather!
About a year before over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, an F-82 interceptor had nearly flown into the ground three times as the pilot attempted to follow a target that his radar operator was picking up. There was a strong inversion that night, and although the target appeared as if it were flying in the air, it was actually a ground target.
Call the port on a scrambled line and tell them to stand by with a ship on emergency call, with a crack interceptor pilot ready to go. Then get me the plotted orbits of every eccentric asteroid that's crossed Mars' orbit in the last two months. And double-A security on everything ... we don't want to let Tawney get wind of this...."
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