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Flight Service, which clears all military aircraft flights, was contacted and asked about the location of aircraft near the Carson Sink area at 3:40P.M. They had no record of the presence of aircraft in that area. Since the colonels had mentioned delta wing aircraft, and both the Air Force and the Navy had a few of this type, we double-checked.
The colonels had crossed the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and Reno and were flying east at 11,000 feet on "Green 3," the aerial highway to Salt Lake City. At 3:40P.M. they were over the Carson Sink area of Nevada, when one of the colonels noticed three objects ahead of them and a little to their right. The objects looked like three F- 86's flying a tight V formation.
Individually they weren't too good, but when I lined them up chronologically and plotted them on a map they took the form of a hot report. At 3:40P.M. a woman at Unionville, Virginia, had reported a "very shiny object" at high altitude. At 4:20P.M. the operators of the CAA radio facility at Gordonsville, Virginia, had reported that they saw a "round, shiny object."
The first one of the highly publicized Washington national sightings started, according to the CAA's logbook at the airport, at 11:40P.M. on the night of July 19 when two radars at National Airport picked up eight unidentified targets east and south of Andrews AFB. The targets weren't airplanes because they would loaf along at 100 to 130 miles an hour then suddenly accelerate to "fantastically high speeds" and leave the area.
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