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He answered me quickly. "No. It was much brighter than that. There was no diffusion whatsoever: no beam or ray or anything like that. Or any little aura around it. It was just neatly bright." "T couldn't really say. It was just round - and that's as close as I can come to it. It was very high. I was sorry to see the thing leave my range of vision. It was that interesting. I had never seen anything like this before." "She was glad to see it." He laughed. "She's a member of NICAP. It was quite a thrill for her. In fact, she made me get out my own car and drive her and Mrs. Varga over to the reservoir. Of course, I first used the radio in the other officer's patrol car to ask Sergeant Thompson for his position at the time. And we drove over to where he was. But when we arrived, there was nothing in sight. The thing had disappeared. Up to that point I was very interested but not overly impressed with what I saw. Then I heard Ben Thompson's story. We drove up to him, oh, five to ten minutes after we first heard him on the patrol-car radio. I never saw him that excited before." "Yeah. He was excited,” answered Sergeant Bobby Gordon. "And Ben is not a flustery type of individual. He was shaken. Not to the point of panic or anything like that. But he was, you know, "Well, actually, Ben is a distant cousin of mine - somewhere back there in the woodpile. And I've known Ben, well, I'd say 15 years. He's a humorous individual, with land of a rough country humor, I guess you'd call it. And he wasn't very humorous that night, you know. Normally, he's a kind of effervescent type of individual, full of jokes. But that night he was quiet. And if you knew him well, Another person who had known Sergeant Ben Thompson for years was Howard Ball, an experienced newsman, who is Suburban Editor of the Paterson Morning News, largest circulation daily in the area. Ball described the Reservoir Police Sergeant to me like this: "Ben is a Davy Crockett-type, a man of the woods. He's an outdoorsman, a hunter. I've never known him to exaggerate anything - except maybe the size of a fish. And of all the people in the world, I think that maybe he was one of the great pooh-poohers of UFOs before he first saw one." more mellow. But it was bright." "You mean that it looked sort of like the moon - if the moon were full?" "Did you have the feeling that it was three-dimensional, or did it look flat?" "What was your wife's reaction?" "Was he really shaken up?" I asked. impressed with what he had seen." "How could you tell he was that excited?" you would sense immediately that he was mighty impressed with something.” Sergeant Ben Thompson certainly didn't appear to me as a man who would be capable of exaggeration,