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A duty officer at the North American Air Defense Command's space detection and tracking center at Colorado Springs told the Denver Post that he could offer no explanations for the sightings. "We're not in the UFOtype business," he said. Then, in his official capacity, he felt compelled to add that the big silver balloon known as the Echo 2 satellite would have been visible moving from northeast to north across the horizon. On August 6th, some of the saucers had left their Rocky Mountain playground for the flatlands of lowa. Police officers and residents in Washington, Muscatine, Clinton, Centerville, and lowa City filed reports of having seen strange objects in the sky. Most of the lowans reported a continuous bright light that changed color from blue to orange and took about three minutes to pass overhead. Three 16-year-old Ames boys said that they had seen a UFO moving across the sky in a westerly direction. As they watched, the object had stopped, changed direction, and then went due north before fading out in the distance. John Johnson of lowa City filed a report of a sighting that he had made from his home-made observation post on the local golf, course. He stated that the UFO had come up from the southern horizon, passed near the North Star before veering sharply off to the northeast and disappearing. Although the majority of sightings of 1965's busy saucer summer seemed to occur in either North or South America, the European continent was not without its dramatic UFO incident. On August 9th, gendarmes in the mountain village of Valensole, France were investigating a report made by a farmer who said that he had seen a mysterious aircraft take off from his field. "It looked like a big Rugby ball and had four metal legs," Maurice Masse, 41, told the local authorities. "I discovered the craft at dawn. With it, was a small human form, about the size of an eight-year-old child. "Suddenly the craft took off and disappeared in the sky. | couldn't believe my eyes,"