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A Goodland policeman, Ron Weehunt, reported seeing an oval- shaped, domed object about fifty feet long that same evening. He said it flew over the city at moderate speed and appeared at an altitude of 1,000 to 1,500 feet. (Norton, Kansas, Telegram, March 14, 1967.) These twenty-two reports are a mere sampling, but they provide an idea of what happened on a single Wednesday night in March 1967. This was not an exceptional flap. It was, in fact, a rather ordinary one, and none of these incidents is of special interest. There were seventy-four flap dates in 1966, many of them much larger than that of March 8, 1967. The flap of March 8 seemed to be largely concentrated in the states of Kansas and Illinois. In fact, much of the UFO activity in recent years has been focused on the Midwestern states. Until the fall of 1967, a simple pattern seems to have emerged: less densely populated areas had a higher ratio of sightings than heavily populated sections. The Air Force discov- ered this odd fact back in the late 1940s. If this were a purely psychologi- cal phenomenon, then there should be more reports in the more densely populated areas. Instead, the reverse has been true. The objects still apparently prefer remote sectors such as hill country, deserts, forested areas, swamplands and places where the risk of being observed is the least. As you will note from the sample cases mentioned previously, the majority of the sightings were made between 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. But throughout rural America, most of the population is at home and planted in front of the TV sets at that hour, particularly on weekday nights. In other studies we have determined that the majority of the reported landings occur very late at night in very isolated locales, where the chances of being observed are very slight. In most farming areas, the people are early risers, and therefore most of the population is in bed before 10 P.M. It is after 10 P.M. that the unidentified flying objects cut loose. When they do happen to be observed on the ground, it is either by accident or design. And usually they take off the moment they have been discovered, or they inexplicably disappear into thin air! Already we can arrive at one disturbing conclusion based upon these basic factors of behavior. If these lights are actually machines operated by intelligent entities, they obviously don’t want to be caught. They come in the dead of night, operating in areas where the risks of being observed are slight. They pick the middle of the week for their peak activities, and they confine themselves rather methodically to the political boundaries of specific states at specific times. All of this smacks uneasily of a covert military operation, a secret build-up in remote areas. Unfortunately, it is not all this simple. The first major UFO flap in The Secret War / 23