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Now, from what the colonels said when they were interviewed after landing at Colorado Springs, they had changed their opinions. Nobody knows what the two colonels saw over Carson Sink. However, it is always possible to speculate. Maybe they just thought they were close enough to the three objects to see them plainly. The objects might have been three F-86's: maybe Flight Service lost the records.
For thirty more minutes the newly arrived F-86's worked in pairs trying to get up to the UFO's altitude, which they estimated to be 55,000 feet, but they couldn't make it. All the time the UFO kept slowly circling and speeding up only when the F-86's seemed to get too close. Then they began to run out of fuel and asked for permission to break off the intercept.
The first hysterical report of the flurry came from the Air Defense Command. On September 23, 1951, at seven fifty-five in the morning, two F-86's on an early patrol were approaching Long Beach, California, coming in on the west leg of the Long Beach Radio range. All of a sudden the flight leader called his ground controller high at twelve o'clock he and his wing man saw an object.
Unfortunately the radar station didn't have any height-finding equipment. The operators knew the direction of the target and its distance from the station but they didn't know its altitude. They reported the target, and two F-86's were scrambled.
It was in a gradual turn to its left, and it wasn't another airplane. The ground controller checked his radars but they had nothing, so the ground controller called the leader of the F-86's back and told him to go after the object and try to identify it. The two airplanes started to climb. By this time the UFO had crossed over them but it was still in a turn and was coming back.
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.
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