Strangers From The Skies - Brad Steiger-pages

Page 35 of 128

Page 35 of 128
Strangers From The Skies - Brad Steiger-pages

Page Content (OCR)

Air Force Base." diamond-shaped formations for about 30 minutes in the Shawnee area. In an official release, the patrol said that the officers had described the UFO's as changing in color from red to white to blue-green. A dispatcher for the Sedgwick County, Kansas, sheriff's office was quoted as saying: "| was a disbeliever, but | saw something up there tonight and so did other observers at the Weather Bureau and McConnell John Shockley, a Wichita Weather Bureau observer, tracked several UFO's between 2:00 and 6:00 A.M. at altitudes of between 6,000 and 9,000 feet and said that one "looked about the size of a Cessna airplane on the screen." In a tape-recorded interview for Wichita's radio station KFH, Police Officer Edward Roberts told of sighting one of the objects east of the airport. "We stood on top of the car," Officer Roberts said. "You could see the object with the naked eye. It looked like it was on the ground or hovering just above the ground ... it was red, greenish-blue and yellowish white ... about 100 yards long and egg-shaped." Dan Carter, Deputy Sheriff of Canyon, Texas, told newsmen that at first he had thought that "a plane had exploded in the air. Then the object appeared to go south." On Monday, August 2nd, the Air Force made an official evaluation of the weekend that had been literally drenched with UFO reports. As their "preliminary conclusion," the Air Force said that people who thought that they had seen flying saucers probably were seeing stars. "Initial study of reports received from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas would indicate that the observations were astrological in nature," the official pronunciamento read. Specifically, the Air Force declared that the celestial culprits responsible for the UFO flap were the planet Jupiter and some assorted stars.