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By Lloyd Mallan One bleak evening last winter a lonely highway in upper New York State became the scene of what is probably the most terrible flying saucer encounter that any human being has yet reported. It was the peak point of an extended "flap" (a word used by saucer buffs to indicate an unusually large number of sightings in any specific area of the country or world) that began in October and was still going on when I visited Ithaca, N.Y., last February to interview personally the people involved. More than 800 sightings of flying saucers were reported by the time I arrived there. The local citizenry had begun to call this unusual situation "The Great Ithaca Flap." Whether the situation was real or imaginary is a moot question. I myself am a skeptic when it comes to flying saucers. But I also witnessed a weird phenomenon in the sky during my stay at Ithaca, which lasted a week. I certainly will not call what I saw a flying saucer, but I cannot explain it despite an extensive background in astronomy and other aerospace sciences. It was not a frightening phenomenon but it was puzzling and provoking. I will go into the details later. The incident of terror on a lonely road was another matter. When I first heard about it from William D. Donovan, president of Aerial Investigations & Research, Inc., a nonprofit flying saucer research organization incorporated under the laws of New York State, I thought he was inventing a science- fiction story. It simply could not be true, I reasoned. The victim, or heroine, of the story is a slim attractive young blonde, the mother of two and a part- time beautician. She had had no intention of revealing her story to the public until she happened to watch a television show on a Syracuse station. The show was a panel discussion about flying saucers. Among the panel members were Donovan and one of his investigators, who lived in Ithaca, Stanley James Orr. She later phoned Orr and told him her fantastic story. Orr and Donovan persuaded me that it would be worthwhile at least to talk with her. So I took along my tape-recorder and cameras and we Her name is Rita Malley. She had reached her twenty-fifth birthday about three weeks before I met her. I was fully determined to study her every little gesture and facial expression as she talked. I wanted to be sure that she wasn't fabricating, exaggerating or being victimized by delusions that may have derived from an hallucination. She spoke calmly, almost matter-of-factly, while sitting on a high stool in her pleasant kitchen, holding her five-year-old son Dana on her lap, throughout the nearly hour-long interview. I set up my tape-recorder on a work-counter, pointed the micro-phone at her and let it go. Here, in her own words, is what was magnetically frozen on the tape: 4 - Ithaca's Terrifying Flying Saucer Epidemics More than 800 UFOs have been seen In this middle-New York State community since October. Here's the story of one of them. drove out to her place in the country. "My husband's name is John. He works at Morris Chain as a foreman. This is Dana on my lap. He's in