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that night. Were they all lying? If so, why? If not, then who was flying these machines, how, and why? The North Vietnamese are pitifully short on aircraft, especially helicopters. Nevertheless, late in June 1968, a formation of inexplicable lights appeared over the Ben Hai River, and one nonexistent ‘‘helicopter”’ was reportedly shot down. Robert Stokes, Newsweek’s Vietnam corre- spondent, was there. Here’s his report (Newsweek, July 1, 1968): It was 11 P.M. and U.S. Army Captain William Bates sat in front of a radio set at his regimental headquarters at Dong Ha. Just then, a Marine forward observer came on the air reporting that he had spotted, through his electronic telescope, thirteen sets of yellowish-white lights moving westerly at an altitude of between 500 and 1,000 feet over the Ben Hai River which runs through the middle of the DMZ. Bates immediately checked with authorities at Dong Ha to see whether there were any friendly aircraft in the area of the reported sightings. He was told there were not. Then he checked with the counterbattery radar unit at Alpha 2, the northernmost allied outpost in I Corps. Within minutes, the answer came back from Alpha 2’s radar tracker: The “‘blips’”’ were all around him, 360 degrees. By 1 A.M., U.S. Air Force and Marine jets were scrambling at Pa Nang in pursuit of the unidentified objects. Forty-five minutes later a Marine pilot radioed that he had just shot down a helicopter. But when an Air Force reconnaissance plane, equipped with infrared detectors which pick up heat, flew over the area, it could find no evidence of burning wreckage. All it could confirm, the plane reported, was a “bummed spot.” These objects were tracked on radar ‘‘nearly every night’’ over the Demilitarized Zone that June. They were never identified, and there was little reason to believe that they were actually Vietcong aircraft. If they were, the North Vietnamese stopped using them very abruptly, and they haven’t been heard from since. A few weeks after this series of incidents, the mystery helicopters turned up in the state of Maryland. At 8:20 P.M. on the night of Tuesday, August 19, 1968, an oval object with a center band of red and white flashing lights hovered above the Rosecroft Racetrack near Phelps Cor- ner, Maryland. One of the many witnesses, Mrs. Gwen E. Donovan, reported that she also saw at least seven helicopters circling the object. “It struck me as funny,”’ she said, ‘because I have never seen so many in the sky at one time.” Is the U.S. Air Force secretly chasing flying saucers in lumbering Unidentified Airplanes / 125