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When the warrant officer had yelled down at him and asked him what he thought they should do, he'd just stood there. "After all," he told me, "what in hell could we do they're bigger than all of us." But the warrant officer did do something. He called to the F-84 pilot he had on combat air patrol west of the base and told him to get ready for an intercept.
He rocked the F-84 back and forth thinking maybe he had a flaw in the plexiglass of the canopy that was blinking out the airplane, but still no airplane. Whatever it was, it was darn high or darn small. It was moving about 300 miles an hour because he had to pull off power and "S" to stay under it.
When something got too close to it, it would automatically pick up speed and pull away. The separation distance always remained about 3 miles. The chase continued on north out of sight of the lights of Rapid City and the base into some very black night. When the UFO and the F-84 got about 120 miles to the north, the pilot checked his fuel; he had to come back.
The controller saw it begin to move, the spotter saw it begin to move and the pilot saw it begin to move all at the same time. There was now no doubt that all of them were watching the same object. Once it began to move, the UFO picked up speed fast and started to climb, heading north, but the F-84 was right on its tail.
There were only a few high cirrus clouds in the sky late on the morning of March 3 when a pilot took off from Luke in an F-84 jet to log some time. He had been flying F-51's in Korea and had recently started to check out in the jets. He took off, cleared the traffic pattern, and started climbing toward Blythe Radio, about 130 miles west of Luke.
Could a high-altitude jet-stream wind have been blowing the smoke cloud? Futch had checked this no. The winds above 20,000 feet were the usual westerlies and the jet stream was far to the north. Several months later I talked to a captain who had been at Luke when this sighting occurred. He knew the F-84 pilot and he'd heard him tell his story in great detail.
The photo lab confirmed that the trail was definitely a vapor trail, not a freak cloud formation. But Air Force Flight Service said, "No other airplanes in the area," and so did Air Defense Command, because minutes after the F-84 pilot broke off contact, the "object" had passed into an ADIZ Air Defense Identification Zone and radar had shown nothing.
And when I talked to him, he said he was damn glad that he was running out of fuel because being out over some mighty desolate country alone with a UFO can cause some worry. Both the UFO and the F-84 had gone off the scope, but in a few minutes the jet was back on, heading for home. Then 10 or 15 miles behind it was the UFO target also coming back.
While the UFO and the F-84 were returning to the base the F-84 was planning to land the controller received a call from the jet interceptor squadron on the base. The alert pilots at the squadron had heard the conversations on their radio and didn't believe it. "Who's nuts up there?" was the comment that passed over the wire from the pilots to the radar people.
There was an F-84 on the line ready to scramble, the man on the phone said, and one of the pilots, a World War II and Korean veteran, wanted to go up and see a flying saucer. The controller said, "O.K., go." In a minute or two the F-84 was airborne and the controller was working him toward the light. The pilot saw it right away and closed in.
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