Page Content (OCR)
69 man who had been stationed there gave me the details. It was on the night of December 1918, with unusually high winds sweeping across the airfield. At times the gusts reached almost seventy miles an hour. Suddenly a weird ball of light flashed into view, at a height of a thousand feet. As the men on the base watched it, astonished, the mysterious light abruptly shot skyward. In an incredibly short time, it reached an altitude of twenty thousand feet and vanished. "Nobody saw any," he replied. "It looked just like I said--a ball of light, going like a streak." "You mean like an engine, or a jet?" He shook his head. "Not a thing. And it didn't make a sound--even when it shot up like that." {p. 80} a balloon. Anybody with brains could see that was screwy. No balloon ever went up that fast--and besides, the thing was going against the wind." The second incident occurred at Salmon Dam, Idaho, on August 13, 1947. When I heard the date, i it sounded familiar. I checked my sightings file and saw it was the same day as al 4. - -f02t. Le et WL TAL In the Twin Falls case, the disk was sighted by observers in a canyon. There was one interesting difference from the usual description. This disk was sky-blue, or else its gleaming surface somehow reflected the sky because of the angle of vision. Although it was not close to the treetops, the observers were amazed to see the trees whip violently when the disk raced overhead, as though the air was boiling from the object's swift passage. At Salmon Dam, that same day, two miners heard an odd roaring sound and stared into the sky. Several miles away, two brightly gleaming disks were circling at high speed. "It was like two round mirrors whirling around the sky," one of the men was later quoted as saying. "They couldn't have been any ordinary planes; not round like that. And they were going too fast." One of these had occurred in California, at Fairfield Suisan Air Force Base. A Seattle "Was there any shape outlined behind the light?" I asked the Seattle man. "Did it leave any smoke behind it?" "Did you hear any guesses about it, or reports later on?" "Some major who didn't see it said it must have been the strange affair at Twin Falls, Idaho.