Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/237

 didn’t have any height-finding equipment so all that the ground controller at the radar site could do was to get the two F-86’s over or under the target, and then they would have to find it visually.

When the two airplanes reached 30,000 feet, the ground controller called them and told them that they were almost on the target, which was still continuing its southwesterly course at about 525 miles an hour. In a few seconds the ground controller called back and told the lead pilot that the targets of his airplane and the UFO had blended on the radarscope and that the pilot would have to make a visual search; this was as close in as radar could get him. Then the radar broke down and went off the air.

But at almost that exact second the lead pilot looked up and there in the clear blue sky several thousand feet above him was a silver-colored sphere. The lead pilot pointed it out to his wing man and both of them started to climb. They went to their maximum altitude but they couldn’t reach the UFO. After ten minutes of unsuccessful attempts to identify the huge silver sphere or disk—because at times it looked like a disk—one of the pilots hauled the nose of his F-86 up in a stall and exposed several feet of gun camera film. Just as he did this the warning light on his radar gun sight blinked on, indicating that something solid was in front of him—he wasn’t photographing a sundog, hallucination, or refracted light.

The two pilots broke off the intercept and started back to Wright-Patterson when they suddenly realized that they were still northwest of the base, in almost the same location they had been when they started the intercept ten minutes before. The UFO had evidently slowed down from the speed that the radar had measured, 525 miles an hour, until it was hovering almost completely motionless.

As soon as the pilots were on the ground, the magazine of film from the gun camera was rushed to the photo lab and developed. The photos showed only a round, indistinct blob—no details—but they were proof that some type of unidentified flying object had been in the air north of Dayton.

Lieutenant Andy Flues was assigned to this one. He checked the locations of balloons and found out that a 20-foot-diameter