The Official Guide to UFOs-pages

Page 76 of 161

Page 76 of 161
The Official Guide to UFOs-pages

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Howard Ball's reference to "throwing my own story back at me," will be elaborated in detail later. It is an amusingly interesting story. Ball, as a newspaper editor in the area, was not only deeply involved with the Wanaque Reservoir UFO sighting of January 11, 1966, covering all possible angles of it, but he was among those who actually observed the UFO. The Honorable Harry T. Wolfe, Mayor of Wanaque Borough, also sighted the UFO on that date. He told me that no one from the Air Force had interviewed him, and he was not aware of any Air Force investigator having been in the Wanaque area for the purpose of interviewing anybody. He was, however, interviewed by NICAP investigators - as were the Reservoir Police officers Ben Thompson and George Dykman, among others from the Wanaque Borough Police Force. The reader already knows that no UFO investigator was sent to Wanaque from Stewart Air Force Base at New-burgh, N.Y. In terms of geography, a more logical base from which to dispatch a UFO investigator would be McGuire Air Force Base near Dover, N.J. At the time of the January 11 sighting, the Base UFO Investigator at McGuire was Major Harold O'Connell. Major O'Connell was quite firm in his denial that anybody had been sent from McGuire to interview people at Wanaque: "I know of nobody from this base that I or anybody else here dispatched to Wanaque to question those UFO observers. I wasn't there myself. And I would be the one guy who would have the authority to do the Major O'Connell was also somewhat sarcastic. "Those Wanaque police officers must be pretty poor cops if they didn't get the name of the investigator who was interviewing them. Or especially ask for his I.D. Card - which is an absolute identification of his military service." Actually, no Reservoir Police Officer that I spoke with at Wanaque could remember that name of the Air Force officer who they alleged had insulted them during an interview in the high school auditorium. Whatever the identity of that mysterious UFO investigator may have been, he was not from the Navy. Mr. George Albert, Chief of Security/Air Police at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station just outside of Philadelphia, Pa., said: "No one from Willow Grove ever went to investigate those UFOs at Wanaque And I've been Chief of Security here for the past two years!" When it comes right down to the hard facts, the only official UFO investigator's are those under the supervision of the Air Force Project Blue Book. There have been instances reported, however, where UFO observers - who claimed to have made photographs of their sighting - were approached by impostors. Dressed in civilian clothes, one of these fakers posed as an officer from the North American Air Defense Command and demanded a set of UFO photos made by a highway inspector in California during 1965. According to a story by Alex Faulkner in the London Sunday Telegraph of January 29, 1967: "More recently, a man claiming to represent 'a (U.S.) Government agency so secret that he couldn't give it's name’ questioned two boys at a school in Norwalk, Connecticut, about the disc-shaped object they said had pursued them last year." There is no record in the files of Project Blue Book that an Air Force investigator had been sent to interview the boys. throwing my own story back at me, they were very courteous." dispatching of others!"