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of science degree in mathematics and a masters in philosophy, was alerted by two teenagers, Shawn Kearns, thirteen, and Donald Burkhardt, four- teen, his son. They called him outside his home on Roundtree Drive to look at an odd machine hovering just above the trees a few yards away. “Tt was disk-shaped,” Burkhardt said later. “‘It was silvery or metallic white in color and seemed to be illuminated by lights—a set of rectangu- lar-shaped lights that blinked on and off and seemed to be revolving across the lower portion of the object, from left to right. Another light emanated from the top but was not blinking. There was no noise such as an engine would make.” The object dropped down behind the crest of a ridge, and Burkhardt returned to his house to get a pair of binoculars. Then he and several others set out to find the thing again. They drove to a nearby road, spotted it and watched it as it flew out of sight. Burkhardt tried to determine if the object was running the legally required red and green lights that even experimental craft must display. If it did, he couldn’t see them. After phoning the Suffolk Air Force Base in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, and answering questions for half an hour, the scientist and the two boys returned to the area of the sighting and examined the ground with flashlights. “We detected a peculiar odor,” Mr. Burkhardt noted. ‘It was comparable to burning chemicals or electrical wiring and confined to the immediate area... a sand and gravel-covered clearing.” Because this sighting was not made public until a month later, few people outside of the immediate vicinity knew of it. But within days after the incident, Mrs. Burkhardt told me, they began to receive a series of peculiar phone calls. The phone would ring, but there would be no one on the other end. Sometimes the phone would continue to ring even after the receiver was picked up. Also, the Burkhardt phone bill began to show a puzzling increase over the previous monthly average. Melville, we might note, had frequent and inexplicable power failures throughout 1967, as did Huntington. For Phillip Burkhardt, unidentified flying objects are no longer a controversial subject or a matter of belief or disbelief. He knows they exist. History prefers fantasy to fact. Legend endures while truth coughs up blood, which dries and fades. We prefer to teach our children that Christopher Columbus was a hero and have buried his glaring faults. We choose to pass on the nonsense that the Great Chicago Fire of October 8, To Hell with the Answer! / 27 How Long Has This Been Going On?