This incident had occurred on November 18, 1948, six weeks after Gorman’s experience. Combs, flying with another lieutenant named Jackson, was about to land his T-6, at 9:45 P.M., when a strange object loomed up near him. It looked like a grayish globe, and it gave off an odd, fuzzy light.
Combs chased the weird object for over ten minutes, during which it appeared to evade every move he made. Once, its speed was nearly six hundred miles an hour, as closely as he could estimate. In a final attempt to identify it, Combs zoomed the T-6 up at a steep angle and flashed his landing lights on it. Before he could get a good look, the globe light whirled off to the east and vanished.
Since Combs’s story had been in the newspapers, Project “Saucer” evidently had felt in wise to give some explanation. When I read it, in the preliminary report, I was amazed. Here was the concluding sentence:
“The mystery was cleared up when the object was identified positively as a cluster of cosmic-ray research balloons.”
Even one of the giant balloons would have been hard to take as the explanation. Combs was almost sure to have collided with it in his head-on passes. But an entire cluster! I tried to picture the T-6 zooming and twisting through the night sky, with several huge balloons in its path. It would be a miracle if Combs got through without hitting one of them, even if each balloon was lighted. But he had seen only one light; so had Lieutenant Jackson. That would mean all the rest of the balloons were unlighted—an unbelievable coincidence.
It was not until months afterward that I found Project “Saucer” had withdrawn this “solution.” In its final report, this case, Number 207, was listed in the “Unidentified” group. How the balloon-cluster explanation ever got into the first report is still a mystery.
When I talked with Gorman, I told him I was baffled by the idea of a light maneuvering through the skies with no airfoil to support it.
“I know,” he said. “It got me, too, at first.”
“You mean you know the answer?” I demanded.
“It’s just my personal opinion,” said Gorman. “But I’d rather not have it printed. You see, I got some ideas from all the questions those Project teams asked me. If my hunch turns out to be right, I might be talking about an official secret.”