Warrington is a respected scientist, and the book seemed well written. As a matter of fact, it does not make any claims about the reality of the phenomenon, but simply calls for more study and appeals to the scientific community to begin to accept it as a legitimate area of inquiry.

I was surprised to find that Science and the UFOs frightened me. I put it aside with no more than the first fire or six pages read.

Much later. after we had really begun to take this whole matter seriously. Anne and I did more research into UFO sightings in our area. We discovered that it is a hotbed of sightings, and has been for nearly half a century.

As it happens, the eighteen-year-old son of one of our neighbors saw something hovering near a road not five miles from our cabin ac approximately nine-thirty on a night in late December. He described it to me as "huge and covered with lights," a typical description. He watched it for some time. Being the son of a former state trooper and pilot, he did not claim that it was a "UFO," but simply told the truth: He did not know what it was, but it appeared to be a solid structure, and as it hovered for a substantial period, more than fifteen minutes, it could not have been a flight of planes. I telephoned the Goodyear Corporation and found that their blimp was not in the area at the time.

The only thing I thought it could have been was some unknown blimp, but even that appeared hard to believe in view of what snore I discovered about it.

Just by talking with friends in April my wife uncovered a personal experience of an early area sighting, one that took place in the late fifties. One of her best friends is an artist and the wife of a well-known composer. In her childhood this woman used to at summer camp at a location not ten miles from where our log cabin now stands, a fact that we did not know when Anne asked her the question we had determined to put to as many people as we could, as part of our research effort.

To at once gain valid information and prevent bias, we had simply been asking people,

"What was your strangest experience?" None of the people we asked had any idea of what was happening to us.

The woman's answer turned out to be highly revealing. She reported that she had seen a flying saucer in 1953, when she was nine. She proceeded to describe an object similar to the one that had appeared in the same immediate area in December 1985. Like so many reports through the years, she described it as huge, full of lights, and hovering. It moved off slowly If all these objects were the results of pranks, then the pranksters would have been operating for more than thirty years-and even in the early fifties they would have had superb mufflers, considering that the object seen then made no more sound than the ones seen today.