“On January 30, 1954, my buddy and I had been fox hunting in southwestern Indiana. We hunted until well after sundown and headed for the car. As we neared it, a jet plane thundered through the darkening sky, from north to south. Placing game and guns in the car, I walked around it to see if the tires were OK. Happening to glance skyward, I let out a yell. There it was, and no mistaking it. A flying saucer blazing in the sky. A real illuminated spaceship. Only it wasn’t moving, just hanging in the sky. Football-shaped, about as long as the apparent diameter of the full moon, it showed red, yellow, and bluish green. [Here he sketched a football shape, glowing red knobs placed at the two ends, yellow lights girdling the middle, and yellow and green arcs curving between the two ends (see [Figure 10]).] I carry an eight-power field glass when hunting and I immediately trained this on the celestial wonder. The result was weird. It seemed to be pulsating with a quivering, twinkling light. We watched it for some five minutes, trying to figure out what we were seeing. Then the spaceship began to get smaller, simply reducing in size without moving. Smaller and smaller it became and in another five minutes it suddenly contracted into a planet—Jupiter, I believe it was. [Jupiter was in the eastern sky 50 to 60 degrees above the horizon.]
Figure 10. Witness’s sketch of Jupiter seen through a jet trail.
“When we realized what we were watching we began to try to figure out the ‘why.’ Suddenly we realized we were looking directly through the path of the plane at the planet and our best guess was that the atmospheric turbulence and temperature change caused by the passage of the jet was to blame for the strange aberration we had witnessed. And we wondered if refraction of the golden light could cause the reds, greens, and blues. Since neither of us uses snake-bite medicine in any form, we figured our observations were about as substantial as our feeble scientific understanding would permit.
“But anyway, I found out how people may see flying saucers and be perfectly honest in their incomplete observations. Had a person inclined to the supernatural taken a good look, jumped in his car, and headed for home at high speed, he would steadfastly have believed he had seen a flying saucer which was evidently observing the earth preparatory to an attack from outer space.”
[[IV-1]] Air Force Files.
[[IV-2]] Ruppelt, E. J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1956.
[[IV-3]] Tacker, L. J. Flying Saucers and the U. S. Air Force. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, p. 59.
[[IV-4]] Payne-Gaposchkin, C. Introduction to Astronomy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1954.
[[IV-5]] Gann, E. K. Fate Is The Hunter. Crest Reprint, New York: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1962, p. 172.