“Well, I’m not in the Guard,” said Art Green. He lit a cigarette, blew out the match. “Why don’t you look into the Gorman case? Get thc dope on that court-martial angle.”
I’d heard of the Gorman case, but the court-martial thing was new to me. Gorman, I recalled, was a fighter pilot in the North Dakota Air National Guard. He had a mystifying encounter with a strange, fast-moving “light” over Fargo Airport in the fall of 1948.
“That case is on my list,” I told Green. “But I don’t remember anything about a court-martial.”
“It wasn’t in the papers. But all the pilots up that way know about it. In his report, Gorman said something about trying to ram the thing. The idea got around that Air Force orders had said to try this. Anyway, it got into the papers and Gorman almost got court-martialed. If his family hadn’t had some influence in the state, the Air Force probably would have pushed it.”
“Are you sure about this?” I said. “You know how those things build up.”
“Ask Gorman,” he said. “Or ask some of the pilots at Fargo.”
Before I left them, Green double-checked my report on his sighting, which Hilton had forwarded. As in the majority of cases, he had seen just one disk. It had hovered at a very high altitude, gleaming in the sun, then had suddenly accelerated and raced off to the north.
“I couldn’t tell its size or speed,” said Green. “But if it was as high as I think, it must have been pretty big.”
Pete told me later that Green believed the disk had been at least twenty miles high, because it was well above clouds at thirty thousand feet.
“It’s kind of hard to believe,” said Pete. “The thing would have to be a lot bigger than a B-twenty-nine, and the speed over two thousand miles an hour.”