Apparently I had been right; this case was the key to the riddle. It had been the first major sighting in 1948. Project “Saucer” had been started immediately afterward. In searching for a plausible answer, which could be published if needed, officials had probably set the pattern for handling all other reports, “Explaining away” would be a logical program, until the public could be prepared for an official announcement. As I went through other case reports, I found increasing evidence to back up this belief. Case 1, the Muroc Air Base sightings, had plainly baffled Project men seeking a plausible answer. Because of the Air Force witnesses, they could not ignore the reports. Highly trained Air Force test pilots and ground officers had seen two fast-moving silver-colored disks circling over the base. Flying at speeds of from three to four hundred miles an hour, the disks whirled in amazingly tight maneuvers. Since they were only eight thousand feet above the field, these turns could be clearly seen. “It is tempting to explain the object as ordinary aircraft observed under unusual light conditions,” the case report reads. “But the evidence of tight circles, if maintained, is strongly contradictory.” Although Case 1 was technically in the “unexplained” group, Wright Field had made a final effort to explain away the reports. Said the Air Materiel Command: “The sightings were the result of misinterpretation of real stimuli, probably research balloons.” In all the world’s history, there is no record of a three-hundred-mile-an-hour wind. To cover the distance involved, the drifting balloons would have had to move at this speed, or faster. If a three-hundred-mile wind had been blowing at eight thousand feet, nothing on earth could have stood it, Muroc Air Base would have been blown off the map. What did the Muroc test pilots _really_ see that day? While searching for the Chiles-Whitted report, ran across the Fairfield Suisan mystery-light case, which I had learned about in Seattle. This was Case 215. The Project “Saucer” comment reads: “If the observations were exactly as stated by the witnesses, the ball of light could not be a fireball. . . . A fireball would not have come into view at 1,000 feet and risen to 20,000. If correct, there is no astronomical explanation. Under unusual conditions, a fireball might appear to rise somewhat as a result of perspective. The absence of trail and sound definitely does not favor the meteor hypothesis, but . . . does not rule it out finally. It does not seem likely any meteor or auroral phenomenon could be as bright as this.” Then came one of the most revealing lines in all the case reports: “In the almost hopeless absence of any other natural explanation, one must consider the possibility of the object’s having been a meteor, even though the description does not fit very well.”