NICAP Director Don Keyhoe has taken a beating, being accused of profiteering, trying to make headlines, and other minor social crimes. But personally I doubt this. Keyhoe is simply convinced that UFO's are from outer space and he's a dedicated man.
While the big NICAP-Air Force battle was going on the UFO's were not waiting to see who won. They were still flying.
At Ellington AFB, Texas, a Ground Observer Corps team spotted a UFO and passed it on to a radar crew. Although the radar crew couldn't pick it up on their sets they saw it visually. The lieutenant in charge told investigators how it crossed from horizon to horizon in 45 seconds.
On March 9, several passengers on a New York to San Juan, Porto Rico airliner were injured when the pilot pulled the big DC-6 up sharply to miss a "large, greenish white, clearly circular-shaped object" which was on a collision course with the plane. The pilots of several other airliners in the same airway confirmed the sighting.
Two weeks later jet interceptors were scrambled over Los Angeles to look for a UFO.
According to the records, the first report of the brilliant and mysterious, flashing, red light came from a man in the east part of Pasadena. But his report was quickly lost in the shuffle as more and more calls began to come in. As the flashing light crossed the Los Angeles Basin from southeast to northwest hundreds of people saw it. Traffic was tied up on the Rose Parade famous Colorado Boulevard as drivers stopped their cars to get out and look. As it neared the Air Defense Command Filter Center in Pasadena the filter center personnel, those that could be spared, went out and looked. They saw it. Police switchboards lit up a solid red as it crossed the San Gabriel Valley.
Near midnight a CAA radar picked up unidentified targets near the Oxnard AFB, at Oxnard, California (northwest of Los Angeles), and at almost that identical time people on the airbase saw the light
This did it, and two powerful jets, equipped with all weather radar, came screaming into the area.
But it was the same old story—no contact—the UFO was gone.
The midwest was visited on the morning of May 23rd, when five observers in Kansas City saw four silver, disc-shaped objects flying in formation at extremely high speed. At one point during their flight two of the objects broke formation and veered off but soon rejoined. It took the objects only four minutes to cross the sky.