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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.
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."
He dialed the long distance operator and said the magic words, "This is Foxtrot Kilo Three Dash Zero Blue." Seconds later he was talking to the duty sergeant at the Columbus Filter Center. A few more seconds and the sergeant had his story. Another jet was scrambled and this time Stringfield, via a radiotelephone hookup to the airplane, gave the pilot a vector.
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?
Stringfield heard the jet closing in but since it was a one-way circuit he couldn't hear the pilot's comments. Once again the UFO took off. This was a fitting climax for the Cincinnati flap. As suddenly as it began it quit and from the mass of data that was collected the Air Force got zero information. In the mystery league the UFO's were still ahead.
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