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43 SHORTLY after my talk with Steele, I flew to the Coast. For three weeks I investigated sightings that had been reported by airline and private pilots and other competent witnesses. At first, the airline pilots were reluctant to talk. Most of them remembered the ridicule that had followed published accounts by other airline men. One pilot told me he had been ordered to keep still about his experience--whether by the company or the Air Force, he would not say. But most of them finally agreed to talk, if I kept their names out of print. One airline captain--I'll call him Blake--had encountered a saucer at night. He and his copilot had sighted the object, gleaming, in the moonlight, half a mile to their left. "We were at about twelve thousand feet," he said, when we saw this thing pacing us. It didn't have any running lights, but we could see the moonlight reflecting from something like bright metal. There was a glow along the side, like some kind of light, or exhaust." Blake grinned crookedly. "You think we didn't try? I cut in toward it. It turned in the same direction. I pulled up about three hundred feet, and it did the same. Finally, I opened my throttles and cut in fast, intending to pull tip if we got too close. I needn't have worried. The thing let out a burst of reddish flame and streaked up out of sight. It was gone in a few seconds." "If not, it had some kind of radar-responder unit to make it veer off when anything got near it. It matched every move I made, until the last one." grin. "Well, my copilot thinks it was a space ship. He says no pilot here on earth could take that many G's, when the thing zoomed." {p. 50} pilot. CHAPTER VI "Could you make out the shape?" I asked. "Then it must have been piloted," I said. I asked him what he thought the saucer was. Blake hesitated, then he gave me a slow I'd heard some "men from Mars" opinions about the saucers, but this was an experienced a, "You don't believe that?" I said.