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About that time, the navigator, who had been awakened by the barrage, came to the deck. Through sleep-fuzzed eyes, he watched the shells zoom up and fall short of their target. He continued to observe the strange action for a few minutes, then, scratching his head sleepily, he walked back to his quarters to make some calculations. "Sir," he reported to the commander a bit later, "if it were possible to see Venus at this time of the day, you would see it at exactly the same position as the silver balloon." Commander Christian sputtered, signaled the destroyer escort to have their navigators calculate the position of the planet Venus. The answers, embarrassingly, all came back the same. The battleship New York had engaged Venus in combat. On the evening of July 24, 1948, an Eastern Airlines DC-3 took off on a scheduled flight to Atlanta, Georgia from Houston, Texas. Twenty miles southwest of Montgomery, Alabama, pilots Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whirled reported a UFO with "two rows of windows from which bright lights glowed." The underside had a "deep blue glow," and a "50-foot trail of orange-red flame shot out the back." Chiles and Whitted were positive that it wasn't the planet Venus that they had seen. George F. Gorman, a 25-year-old second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard was waiting his turn to land at Fargo on October 1, 1948 when a bright light made a pass at him. When he called the tower to complain about the errant pilot, he was informed that was no other aircraft in the vicinity except a Piper Cub, which was just landing, and Gorman's own F-51. Gorman could still see the mysterious light off to one side, so he decided to investigate. Within moments, he found himself in a collision course with the strange light, and he had to take the F-51 into a dive to escape the unswerving globe of light. The UFO repeated the attack, and once again Gorman just managed to escape collision. When the UFO at last disappeared, pilot Gorman was left shaken and convinced that "its maneuvers were controlled by thought or reason." After these three "classic cases" in 1948, as well as numerous other less dramatic sightings, many Air Force pilots were reminded of the weird "foo fighters," which several Allied personnel had seen in World War Il. Often while on bombing missions, crews noticed strange lights that followed their bombers.