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"You see, this thing could maneuver so fast. And it made no round turns, like an aircraft would as it started peeling off. You know, you can watch an airplane - I don't care how fast it's going - go into a turn. But with this thing, you couldn't see it make a turn. It would just go directly south, or north, or east, or whatever way it wanted to travel - and it would decide to go up. While it was going straight ahead at a very fast rate of speed - it would just shoot right straight up." "Vertical, right. And then it would set there for a few minutes, or seconds, and then all of a sudden come right back down. Then it would go to the right, to the left - making square turns. And I think if any aircraft did this, or anything else I've ever seen in the air, that kind of maneuver would bust it up. It would break apart." Amazing as his story may seem, Sergeant Ben Thompson claims that he is willing to stand up to anyone, in any court and to any individual, and swear under oath that he has seen what he describes with such graphic clarity. "I would even appear before the President of the United States of America," he told me, "and defy him to call me a liar!" He recounts a little personal anecdote to illustrate why people should not be so quick to scoff at what may appear to be unusual in nature - and yet be easily explainable if they sat back to think things out and try to find an explanation. Once while hunting in the woods he saw a ketchup bottle moving toward him along the ground. He was startled, but he knew that ketchup bottles cannot move by themselves. So he went up close to the bottle and discovered that a copperhead snake had caught its head tightly in the bottle-opening. He grabbed the snake by its tail and carried it home, bottle and all, where he killed and burned it to prevent its venom from soaking into the ground and poisoning the land. Since he had no evidence of the snake in the bottle, nobody believed him later when he told of seeing a ketchup Sergeant Ben Thompson is especially bitter about what he calls the stupid tactics of Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force's official project to evaluate Unidentified Flying Objects. "They don't listen to what you saw," he says. "They tell you what you saw! I would never report anything to them. It's a waste of effort." "The first time you saw it, in January, how long did it stay in sight?" "Quite a long time. Quite a while. "What did you think, personally, when you first saw it?" "To tell the truth, I didn't know what to think. I mean, I knew that there was something there that I'd never seen before in the sky. Especially because of those square turns. "Vertically? Just like that?" bottle "walking."