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operational, but if you call us back in about an hour we'll give you the information - whatever information we can gather by then.’ "In the meantime, I spoke by phone with the Mayor of Wanaque, Harry Wolfe, and I spoke with Sergeant Ben Thompson and Chief John Casazza, both of the Wanaque Reservoir Police, and two young boys who had observed this thing (the UFO) at the Wanaque Reservoir - and we started developing a story for the newspaper. "And I'll interject here that newspaper people, reporters in particular, exaggerate these (UFO) reports. I think that sometimes reports of UFO sightings are pretty shoddily handled." (A case in point was the widespread report in the press that the Wanaque UFO of January 11, 1966, the one seen by Howard Ball and others, had "drilled a nine-foot-wide hole in the reservoir's ice as me. area where this thing (the UFO) was supposed to be. And there was no such thing as a hole being burned in the ice by this powerful light. Where that story came from I don't know. Just at that time there happened to be from 12, to 14, to 16 inches of ice over the lake. And that's a lot of ice!" (Howard Ball said: "That's poppycock! That's balderdash! If there were ice on the reservoir today and you went up there, that hole would be there in the same place-and that's because there's an intake pipe within 40 feet of the hole and it creates a turbulence in the water, which never freezes at that point but There were other discrepancies carelessly reported as fact by both the press and magazine reporters, such as the size and speed of the object. But probably the most misleading of all the reports was the one sent out by the wire services about Howard Ball's own sighting. As Ball himself told me: 'I think that the wire services in particular don't do a very good job, sometimes, on these sightings. So the American public gets a wrong or exaggerated idea. And I'm going to bring this out now. "I called Stewart Air Force Base back in about an hour. And I got the sergeant with the unpronounceable name and he put me through to the major and I asked that officer: 'Did you make any identification of the object that was seen over Passaic County, New Jersey?’ "And the major said: "We certainly have. It's been definitely identified as a helicopter carrying a big strobe light." Ball was smiling broadly now. "So I asked the major: "What is your authority for the identification? Who identified the object?" Ball paused to shake his head and laugh. "Now this is the story that was sent out on the AP and UPI wires. They just didn't bother to check with me. This is the story that Washington put out - that this UFO had been identified as a helicopter with a big strobe light on it" policemen watched." Both the Chief of the Reservoir Police Force and Newsman Ball denied this to (Chief Casazza told me: "No, that isn't true. That is out for a simple reason. We checked that whole creates a black rim around the ice.") "And he answered me: 'A newspaper editor from Paterson, New Jersey, named Howard Baft."" "You mean," I asked, "that the Air Force Information Office released the same story?"