One air-base officer, I recalled, had insisted that the object had been a lighted balloon. Checking the secret report from the Air Weather Service, I found this: “Case 2 15. Very high winds, 60-70 miles per hour from southwest, all levels. Definitely prohibits any balloon from southerly motion.” _This case is officially listed as answered_. In Case 19, where a cigar-shaped object was seen at Dayton, Ohio, the Project investigator made a valiant attempt to fit an answer: “Possibly a close pair of fireballs, but it seems unlikely. If one were to stretch the description to its very limits and make allowances for untrained observers, he could say that the cigar-like shape might have been illusion caused by rapid motion, and that the bright sunlight might have made both the objects and the trails nearly invisible. “This investigator does not prefer that interpolation, and it should he resorted to only if all other possible explanations fail.” _This case, too, is officially listed as answered_. Case 24, which occurred June 12, 1947, twelve days before the Arnold sighting, shows the same determined attempt to find an explanation, no matter how farfetched. In this case, two fast-moving objects were seen at Weiser, Idaho, Twice they approached the earth, then swiftly circled upward. The Project investigator tried hard to prove that these might have been parts of a double fireball. But at the end, he said, “In spite of all this, this investigator would prefer a terrestrial explanation for the incident.” It was plain that this report had not been planned originally for release to the public. No Project investigator would have been so frank. With each new report, I was more and more convinced that these had been confidential discussions of various possible answers, circulated between Project “Saucer” officials. Why they had been released now was still a puzzle, though I began to see a glimmer of the answer. The Chiles-Whitted sighting was listed as Case 144. As I started on the report, I wondered if Major Boggs’s “bolide” answer would have any more foundation than these other “astronomical” cases. The report began with these words: “There is no astronomical explanation, if we accept the report at face value. But the sheer improbability of the facts as stated, particularly in the absence of any known aircraft in the vicinity, makes it necessary to see whether any other explanation, even though farfetched, can be considered.” After this candid admission of his intentions, the Project consultant earnestly attempts to fit the two pilots’ space ship description to a slow-moving meteor. “It will have to be left to the psychologists,” he goes on, “to tell us whether the immediate trail of a bright meteor could produce the subjective impression of a ship with lighted windows. Considering only the Chiles-Whitted sighting, the hypothesis seems very improbable.”