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a sentimental streak. I interviewed him in his home, which he built himself with the help of a brother. In his backyard was a deer, a full-grown buck, that he had trained from babyhood. He had rescued the buck from a pack of wild dogs in the woods around the reservoir. With a branch torn from a tree he had killed the vicious dogs, who were as fierce as timber wolves, and chased the little buck three miles in 94° heat to catch it and save it from starving. The dogs had killed the little deer's mother and another buck. Affectionately, he christened the little buck "Bambi." The Sergeant Thompson is a stern-looking, handsome man, with black wavy hair, thick eyebrows, a ruddy complexion and a lean, wiry figure. His stern appearance vanishes when he smiles. He does not drink hard liquor and only occasionally has a beer or two. His fellow police officers told me that he's like an Indian in the woods. He himself told me that: "If somebody took a tree anywhere in these woods and moved it within ten feet of where it was, I would know that tree was moved." Thompson, when I interviewed him, had been with the Wanaque Reservoir Police Force for six years. Before that, for 20 years, he had been a Security Guard at the E.I. DuPont de Nemours plant at Pompton Lakes. "In other words," he said, "I've been trained to observe things carefully. Things and people. That's what we work with." During World War II he was in the infantry and fought on the islands of Guam and Iwo Jima. He is thoroughly familiar with aircraft of all lands. He puts it this way: "Yes, sir! I watch that sky carefully at night when I'm coon hunting or fox trapping. And I do a lot of hunting. You see, I wait for the sound of an airplane because as it comes over, the noise of its engines drown out any noise I might make when I'm stalking. And I can get close to the animals that way, without their hearing my approach." Also, he's very familiar with the appearance of landing lights on airplanes. "I've seen them many times," he said, "blinking their lights at each other, just like bus drivers do when they pass each other Certainly the weird light that he observed close-up on the night of October 11, 1966, was not flashed from an airplane - or he would have recognized it. It was so weird, in fact, that almost anybody would be hard-pressed to believe his story was not fictional if Sergeant Thompson were not such a straightforward, earnest and down-to-earth type of man. Throughout a long interview plus several hours longer with the man in his own home, where he was casually dressed and relaxed, I was able to study Sergeant Thompson closely. I am convinced that his story is sincere. He is the type, as one of his friends described him, whose main interests are the commonplace things of life. "When he sees a squirrel over his rifle-sight," this friend said, "that he can understand." Sergeant Thompson has a deep sandpapery voice. Rarely does he show emotion as he talks rapidly in a clipped but matter-of-fact manner. Here's the story he told me of what happened to him in those State of New Jersey permitted him to keep it. Now it wags its tail wildly when it sees him, approach and eats coughdrops out of his hand. on the highway."