Louisiana drawl, “you know that for a year I’ve read every flying saucer report that’s come in and that I never really believed in the things.” Then he hesitated and added, so fast that I could hardly understand him, “But you should read this wire.” The speed with which he uttered this last statement was in itself enough to convince me. When Max talked fast, something was important.
A half hour later I was at ATIC—just in time to get a call from the Pentagon. Someone else had gotten out of bed to read his copy of the wire.
I used the emergency orders that I always kept in my desk and caught the first airliner out of Dayton to Rapid City, South Dakota. I didn’t call the 4602nd because I wanted to investigate this one personally. I talked to everyone involved in the incident and pieced together an amazing story.
Shortly after dark on the night of the twelfth, the Air Defense Command radar station at Ellsworth AFB, just east of Rapid City, had received a call from the local Ground Observer Corps fiber center. A lady spotter at Black Hawk, about 10 miles west of Ellsworth, had reported an extremely bright light low on the horizon, off to the northeast. The radar had been scanning an area to the west, working a jet fighter in some practice patrols, but when they got the report they moved the sector scan to the northeast quadrant. There was a target exactly where the lady reported the light to be. The warrant officer, who was the duty controller for the night, told me that he’d studied the target for several minutes. He knew how weather could affect radar but this target was “well defined, solid, and bright.” It seemed to be moving, but very slowly. He called for an altitude reading, and the man on the height-finding radar checked his scope. He also had the target—it was at 16,000 feet.
The warrant officer picked up the phone and asked the filter center to connect him with the spotter. They did, and the two people compared notes on the UFO’s position for several minutes. But right in the middle of a sentence the lady suddenly stopped and excitedly said, “It’s starting to move—it’s moving southwest toward Rapid.”
The controller looked down at his scope and the target was beginning to pick up speed and move southwest. He yelled at
