The Official Guide to UFOs-pages

Page 72 of 161

Page 72 of 161
The Official Guide to UFOs-pages

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college students. So the Giacomo theory about the origin of UFO wasn't strictly valid, yet special atmospheric conditions combined with the presence of radioactive radon in the air might explain the fourfold increase of radiation that night of October 11, 1966. Or maybe the explanation lay in the UFO itself? Both John de Giacomo and his classmate Jim Bonney quit "fooling around" with their Geiger counter shortly after 8:30 that evening. They had homework to do for classes the next day. Yet 45 minutes later, Police Sergeant Ben Thompson sighted the strangest UFO of all. Was the increase in radiation level still present at that time? Nobody knows, because All that can be stated with certainty is that the following evening about the same time, the radiation background had returned to normal. A four-times increase in background radiation is not a great amount, but it is enough to be puzzling. Could that increase have been the result of some strange propulsion system that powered the UFO, that enveloped the area even before the UFO was sighted? And that disappeared after the UFO had disappeared? Still, a contradiction persists. Pompton Lakes Police Sergeant Bobby Gordon, his wife and a neighbor had first sighted the UFO moving at a high altitude. Their position was south of Ringwood and the Wanaque Reservoir. How could the increase in radiation have come from that - or even a greater - distance, assuming that the UFO was far away from the area at 8:30 P.M. Or was it? Maybe it was hovering there invisibly, or maybe it was there but simply was not sighted? In any case; the question mark to the mystery now has an exclamation point added to it. Equally mysterious is the situation mentioned to me by Sergeant Ben Thompson: the unprecedented abrupt appearance of seven helicopters and 10 to 12 high-performance jet airplanes over the Wanaque Reservoir a mere 15 minutes after his sighting of the strangest UFO ever. A side-mystery involves his statement to me regarding a Government investigator, as was reported in Part I of this story: "We notified said Government. And they sent an investigator to Lakeland High School, where he interviewed us. He came right out and said we were 'seeing things.'" After exhaustive research that bordered on detective work, I could find no evidence whatever that any department of the U.S. Government had sent a UFO investigator to Wanaque, N.J. In fact, there was no record in existence that any military or civilian department of the Government had been responsible for the enigmatic appearance of seven helicopters and about a dozen jet airplanes which purportedly had been circling over the Wanaque Reservoir in the same area where Thompson had sighted his UFO on October 11, 1966. Yet I must believe Sergeant Thompson's statement. He is not the hallucinatory type. Besides, Sergeant Bobby Gordon of the Pompton Lakes, N.J., Police Force independently told me that he had seen six helicopters in the area at the same hour that evening during which Thompson had seen them. Neither police officer had ever before observed that many aircraft flying over the area at one time. sighting? To find an answer, I checked with U. S. Air Force officers in the Pentagon and at Project Blue Book; with officers of the U. S. Navy at Lakehurst, N.J., Floyd Bennett, N.Y., and Willow Grove, Pa., Naval nobody was checking this. Were these unusual overflights a mere coincidence - or were they somehow related to the UFO