“I don’t know the answer,” said Dick, “but I’m positive of one thing. Either the Air Force is sitting on a big secret, or they’re badly scared because they don’t know the answer.” During the next week or so, I covered several northwest and mountain states. Although I was chiefly trying to find out about Project “Saucer,” I ran onto two sightings that were not on my list. One of these had occurred in California, at Fairfield Suisan Air Force Base. A Seattle man who had been stationed there gave me the details. It was on the night of December 1918, with unusually high winds sweeping across the airfield. At times the gusts reached almost seventy miles an hour. Suddenly a weird ball of light flashed into view, at a height of a thousand feet. As the men on the base watched it, astonished, the mysterious light abruptly shot skyward. In an incredibly short time, it reached an altitude of twenty thousand feet and vanished. “Was there any shape outlined behind the light?” I asked the Seattle man. “Nobody saw any,” he replied. “It looked just like I said—a ball of light, going like a streak.” “Did it leave any smoke behind it?” “You mean like an engine, or a jet?” He shook his head. “Not a thing. And it didn’t make a sound—even when it shot up like that.” “Did you hear any guesses about it, or reports later on?” “Some major who didn’t see it said it must have been a balloon. Anybody with brains could see that was screwy. No balloon ever went up that fast—and besides, the thing was going against the wind.” The second incident occurred at Salmon Dam, Idaho, on August 13, 1947. When I heard the date, it sounded familiar. I checked my sightings file and saw it was the same day as the strange affair at Twin Falls, Idaho. In the Twin Falls case, the disk was sighted by observers in a canyon. There was one interesting difference from the usual description. This disk was sky-blue, or else its gleaming surface somehow reflected the sky because of the angle of vision. Although it was not close to the treetops, the observers were amazed to see the trees whip violently when the disk raced overhead, as though the air was boiling from the object’s swift passage. At Salmon Dam, that same day, two miners heard an odd roaring sound and stared into the sky. Several miles away, two brightly gleaming disks were circling at high speed. “It was like two round mirrors whirling around the sky,” one of the men was later quoted as saying. “They couldn’t have been any ordinary planes; not round like that. And they were going too fast.” During this part of my trip, I also was told that one saucer had fallen into a mountain lake. This came to me secondhand. The lone witness was said to have rushed over to his car to get his camera as the disk approached. When it plunged toward the lake, he was so startled that he failed to snap the picture until the moment it struck. This story sounded so flimsy that I didn’t bother to list it.