Page Content (OCR)
COMMENT: The observer was David N. Johnson, assigned by his publisher to "Conduct an aerial search of the Northwest states in an effort to see and photograph a flying disc. Conduct this patrol for so long a time as you believe reasonable, or until you see a flying disc." Mr. Johnson was about to give up the search after three days of steady flying, when he saw the single disc. Using an 8mm motion picture camera, he photographed the disc for 10 seconds - but nothing unusual showed up on the developed film. Yet other reliable persons had also seen the object from the ground. Quoting Mr. Johnson, from his sworn statement to the Intelligence people at Fourth Air Force Headquarters: "I was subsequently informed that personnel on both the United Air Lines side of Gowen Field, and on the National Guard side, observed a black object maneuvering in front of the same cloud formation which by now had grown so that the clouds reached a probable height of 19,000 or 20,000 feet from a mean base of 13,500 or 14,000 feet, mean sea level. Three of these men were National Guard personnel and I talked to them, asking them to describe what they saw, before telling them my story, in order to avoid suggestion of inference of a leading nature. They saw the object (from the ground) while I was on my second search. They believed the time to have been 14:00 hours (2:00 P.M.). The object performed in DIMENSIONS: Size of a quarter held at arm's length; observers estimate that the UFOs were each 200 feet long and 60 feet thick. the same erratic manner, they said, as I observed." TIME/PLACE OF SIGHTING: March 4, 1960, at 5:53 P.M. local time/Dubuque, Iowa. DURATION: Four minutes. NUMBER OF OBSERVERS: Two. TYPE OF OBSERVER: Man (profession not given) and his wife. NUMBER OF OBJECTS: Three. OBSERVER RELIABILITY: Indeterminable. SHAPE: Elliptical. COLOR: Brightly colored like a star; between the brightness of the moon and the planet Venus. SOUND: None. ALTITUDE: Not given, but above 2,000 feet. SPEED: Approximately 200 miles an hour. TACTICS: Flew across the sky in trail, traveling north northeast.