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eyesight to the bright moonlight. Yonts then got on his radio and confirmed that Lt. Cardeni had indeed issued orders to shoot down anything flying under 2700 feet of altitude. About 1:00 AM local German Time, Sgt. Yonts had his chance as something came down the valley headed for the pass. He described it as a flattened ellipsoid with rounded edges, about 30 feet long, and glowing with a silvery iridescence. He said it was moving at a rapid speed that was impossible to judge accurately as it was apparently trying to be evasive by zigzagging side to side. It took a few seconds for Sgt. Yonts's Cannon's computer and Doppler radar to calculate a precise speed, range, and direction of travel and to achieve a lockon. When the cannon was locked onto the object and he was visually sighting the object through the reticule gun-sights he began firing. First a few rounds for effect and then three four second bursts of 110 rounds each into the side of the object which was at about eye level. Sgt. Yonts was almost eye level with the object as he watched his rounds pouring into its sides. He was expecting to see the "blooming flower" effect of the phosphorus rounds exploding but he did not, although he could clearly follow the trail of his shots pouring into the side of the object. "It was as if the shells were being absorbed or being vaporized at the explosion by some sort of "force field"., Yonts said. Yonts' perception was that the rounds were going into invisible tubes that contained the detonations, so that he saw only pie-tin sized explosions but not phosphorus "blooming" that he expected. this was quite a remarkable containment of shells having a 35 meter kill radius. Sergeant Yonts could observe "Tex" Thomas shooting down on the object from the higher elevation across the pass and he noted that Tex's rounds were trailing the object missing it. At the same time as the shooting was going on, on the mountainside, Sergeant William McCracken from Pittsburgh, KS was inside the launch control console of a Chaparral Missile Battery in the valley was rotating his console according to directions supplied by his uphill observer (the operator in the launch console could not see out at night because of the reflections on the Plexiglas's bubble from the instruments on his control panel). Up until that point, McCracken had not painted anything on his radar screen. When he had rotated to the 10 o'clock position (a heading of about 300 degrees), Sgt. McCracken saw a green light flashing on his console and heard a warbling tone indicating an infra-red signature lockon. After tuning adjustments, the sergeant pushed the "launch" button and a bright fire ignited on one of the launch rails as a Chaparral Antiaircraft Missile streaked skyward. The missile climbed to about 900 feet (near the minimum operating altitude of the missile), found the flying object, moved along side of it, turned close in front of it, and detonated its 75 pounds of high explosives warhead. (The Chaparral, designed to bring down conventional aircraft with cockpits near the front. always moved to the front of a target before detonating so as to potentially kill the pilots and disable a plane's engines by shutting off their air.) The gunners and observers on the two mountain sides, missile crews in the valley, and anyone else not currently known about, saw the target start wobbling and then stop forward motion and 25