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up in defiance of gravity, was what witnesses believed to be the disc shooting upward through the clouds. Doesn't this sound ridiculous, if you stop and think about it? It's the kind of response that has typically been provided for decades when officials are pressured to say something. And even if Molinaro hedged his explanation by qualifying it as a "guess," this kind of subtle understatement is quickly lost to the mass media and the general public. And was his guess at all reasonable? I contacted weather experts and scientists specializing in cloud physics, something the FAA would have been wise to have done before issuing its explanation. No, this could not possibly be what witnesses saw, I learned. Hole-punch clouds are formed when ice crystals from a higher cloud deck fall onto a lower one. The hole is formed by ice crystals falling downward, not upward as Molinaro postulated. Super-cooled water droplets in the lower cloud adhere to the crystals, enlarging them and leaving a space around them in the cloud. The crystal mass accumulates weight and then falls farther, below the second cloud, evaporating when it hits warmer air. downward, The key factor is that this process can only happen at below freezing temperatures. The temperature at 1,900 feet above O'Hare Airport the day of the sighting was 53 degrees F, according to the National Weather Service. The dimatologists and other weather experts I spoke to all stated that temperatures must be below freezing for a hole-punch cloud to explain the sighting. And they told me that a hole in a cloud can be formed by only one other means: evaporation by heat. And this just happens to fit the witnesses’ explanation of what they saw: a high-energy, round object very likely to be emitting some form of intense radiation or heat while cutting through the cloud bank. Thus, isn't evaporation by heat the most logical explanation, the "best guess," for what happened? The NARCAP team also recognized the folly of Molinaro's also the folly team explanation: We postulate that the instantaneous nature of the hole formation, the circular shape, and its sharp edges all point to the direct emission of, for example, electromagnetic radiation from the surface of the oblate spheroid as the proximate cause of the hole in the clouds. We cannot identify the object or phenomenon lying inside the oblate spheroid surface, but two conclusions seem inescapable: (1) the object or phenomenon observed would have to have been something objectively and externally real to create the hole effect; and, (2) the hole phenomenon associated with this object cannot be explained by either conventional weather phenomena or conventional aerospace craft, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. [5] Unfortunately, our government is not willing to issue a sensible statement about what actually happened, giving due respect to witness reports, and instead refuses to investigate. Once again, a curious general public is left out in the cold, frustrated, alarmed, and perplexed by their of Molinaro's