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did Waterloo, Iowa, and St. Louis, Missouri. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved in some of these sightings. We cannot dismiss them all, nor can we explain them. Texas had more than 20 percent of all the sightings in 1897, and that state has had continuous sightings for the past twenty years. Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, South Dakota, Texas and Washington, D.C., had sightings on April 15, 1897. About 25 percent of all the 1897 sightings occurred at approximately 9 P.M.; 20 percent at 8 P.M.; 20 percent at 10 P.M.; 15 percent at midnight. Others were scattered in the early-morning hours. Most of the reported landings took place at 11 P.M. or later. This time pattern still holds true today. Obviously, the great 1897 flap had much in common with the sightings of 1968. In short, nothing much has changed. We have no way of knowing how many sightings went unreported, or how many published reports have been lost or still remain undiscov- ered. New ones are coming to light all the time. Each new flap since 1964 seems to have begun somewhere in the Midwest, in those mysteriously favored states, and spread out from there. Of course, because the activity seems to cluster in the more thinly populated areas, the reports are reduced to an unsatisfactory trickle. Despite all the collections of descrip- tions of lights and wheels in the sky, we suffer from a real shortage of geographical data and are only just now beginning to learn how to properly analyze what little ‘‘hard’’ data is available. If the newspapers of 1897 had not been so willing to ridicule the sightings and the sighters and had not indulged in devising nonsensical and misleading sightings of their own, we might have been able to untangle some of this sooner. There was no one crying ‘‘Censorship!”’ in 1897, yet many skeptical editors probably chose to ignore the phenome- non altogether, just as many of their modern counterparts do. A great cigar equipped with a powerful beacon is supposed to have passed over Sistersville, West Virginia, on April 19, 1897, but when I visited Sistersville in 1967, I learned to my dismay that the old newspaper office—and all of its files—had been destroyed by fire in the early 1950s.* Flying saucers were still being seen regularly in Sistersville in 1966-67. The town’s leading attorney, Robert Wright, told me, “‘We’ve been seeing these things for months. In fact, since last summer they’ve been showing up here almost every Wednesday like clockwork. Everybody’s been watching them...but not everybody likes to talk about them...One Wednesday a few weeks 82 / Operation Trojan Horse